DataDome says Meta bots made nearly half of Q3 AI agent traffic
Original title: Half the AI bot traffic hammering your website comes from Meta
The firm reports AI agent requests rose 41.5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion.
DataDome’s AI Traffic Report Q3 2026 attributes 12.4 billion requests, 49.7% of recorded AI agent traffic, to Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-WebIndexer. It says Meta’s Muse made 29.1 million requests in its first 12 days of full availability, from September 22 to October 3, and that 99.3% of a Muse sample came from cloud and CDN infrastructure. Agentic browser traffic rose from 12.5 million requests in August to 58.2 million in September. In that sample, 8.9% of Muse requests hit sensitive endpoints, mostly forms.
Unconfirmed: All traffic shares and request counts are DataDome’s measurements, not independently confirmed.
- Nearly half of 2026 AI agent traffic through September occurred in Q3, DataDome says.
- ClaudeBot ranked fourth for the quarter and overtook GPTBot.
- Excluding Muse, September agentic browser traffic more than tripled to 38.7 million.
- Comet’s traffic fell 65% from July to September.
- Separate training, search, and retrieval bots can be allowed or blocked individually.
From the original article
2 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
AI agent traffic across DataDome’s network grew 41. 5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion requests in Q3 2026, according to the company’s AI Traffic Report Q3 2026. Meta’s Muse generated 29.
By Anamarija Pogorelec · helpnetsecurity.com
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