That’s why bot management in 2025 is about more than blocking malicious bot traffic—it’s about understanding who or what is interacting with your applications: are they legitimate or illegitimate users, and what their intent is in real-time and over time. This is becoming an existential question for businesses, from publishers to e-commerce, because LLM crawler and agentic traffic is exploding, quadrupling from 2.6% to 10.1% of bot traffic between January and August 2025 for DataDome customers.

Source: DataDome

The first step is visibility: being able to distinguish humans from bots, verified from unverified AI bots, and good from malicious intent. With that intelligence in hand, organizations can make informed choices: allow trusted bots and agents, block malicious automation, and apply policies that reflect business goals. 

Earlier this year, DataDome expanded our capabilities to explicitly identify this new category, surfacing agentic AI and LLM crawler activity directly within the dashboard. This builds on more than a year of detection breakthroughs from our threat research team, focused specifically on LLM and AI traffic patterns. The result is immediate value for customers:

• Detects and classifies AI and LLM traffic automatically into its own category
• Shows what exactly is interacting with your digital assets and how, and for what purpose
• Enables intelligent policy responses tailored to your traffic

Now, through partner integrations with Tollbit and Skyfire, DataDome has enabled enterprises to protect their sites and content and monetize the AI traffic visiting their websites, mobile apps, and APIs. Our threat dashboard provides a new “Monetize” response policy option, so you can configure responses by AI and LLM providers, whether OpenAI, Perplexity, Amazon, or others, who you may want to hit a paywall for access.

In sum, bot management may have reached “mature mainstream” status in this latest Hype Cycle, but the pace of innovation in AI and agentic AI and what that means to many businesses has unlocked new use cases and value to consider adding or expanding bot management solutions for your infrastructure.

Assess your application security for free with DataDome

Identified as a representative vendor in the Hype Cycle, DataDome protects websites, mobile applications, and APIs against malicious bots and online fraud on any infrastructure. In addition, DataDome offers AI traffic monetization options, so you can turn AI traffic into another revenue stream. To see the attacks targeting your platform in real time, start your Vulnerability Scan to access your threat dashboard now.