‘This is coming for everyone’:
A new kind of AI bot takes over the web
People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, a major shift that has unleashed a new kind of bot loose on the web. To offer users a tidy AI summary instead of Google’s “10 blue links,” companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started sending out bots to retrieve and recap content in real time. They are scraping webpages and loading relevant content into the AI’s memory and “reading” far more content than a human ever would. According to data from TollBit, a New York-based start-up that helps news publishers monitor and make money when AI companies use their content, traffic from retrieval bots grew 49 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024. TollBit’s report, based on data from 266 websites—half of which are run by national and local news organizations—suggests that the growth of bots that retrieve information when a user prompts an AI model is on an exponential curve.
Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys?
In
recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones
built using large language models. Any action that can be captured by
text—from playing a video game using written commands to running a
social media account—is potentially within the purview of this type of
system.
LLM agents don’t have much of a track record yet, but to
hear CEOs tell it, they will transform the economy—and soon. Despite
that, like chatbot LLMs, agents can be chaotic and unpredictable. Here’s what could happen as we try to integrate them into everything.
—Grace Huckins
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