The first Woodstock in 1969, where Richie Havens, Joan Baez, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and others performed, was an iconic 3-day music festival. Organizers sold 180,000 tickets to the event, but without ticket booths or fences on-site, nearly 500,000 people ultimately attended. What Woodstock showed is that while original content is king, robust security is essential to ensure content creators can fully realize the value of their efforts.

Many online content sites today face a similar situation. Whether publishers, online communities, or product review sites, they deliver great content, such as breaking news articles and original community discussions, which are currently harvested for free by LLM crawlers, in many cases, to train their AI models and provide instant responses to queries from millions of paid subscribers. There are no fences or ticket booths to collect payment.

The era of AI licensing deals

That’s changing. Until now, most content monetization for AI has been limited to one-off deals. Google signed a $60 million per year content deal with Reddit for real-time API access for its LLM training 18 months ago. OpenAI has reached licensing agreements with a number of media companies, including Hearst, News Corp, and Conde Nast. Perplexity recently relaunched its year-old revenue-sharing program for publishers, timed to its Comet browser release.

The scale problem with current AI content licensing

But this model is hardly scalable given the explosion of LLMs and agentic AI companies that want to consume content from hundreds, if not thousands, of content creators. In many cases, the long tail on both sides lacks the resources or skillset to enable an efficient marketplace, given the pace of AI innovation. And there has not been anything more than a toothless robots.txt “honor code” and simple technical solutions to enforce any contractual provisions. As a result, lots of non-ticket holders get to attend the concert, so to speak, for free.

A glimpse at long-term value creation

Despite some eye-popping initial deal numbers, the longer-term potential is huge. As we start another NFL season, one analogy that comes to mind is that the value of the NFL’s annual broadcast rights has climbed from around $1 billion 30 years ago to over $10 billion today. 

It’s easy to see the same value creation curve in the age of AI. Businesses can now turn AI traffic and data into a revenue stream without compromising security. But the pace of innovation in 2025 so far is head-spinning, and it’s fair to say that business models are still being developed.

DataDome customers, for example, saw AI/LLM request traffic nearly quadrupled between January and August 2025, from 2.6% to 10.1% of total bot traffic. Now, monthly traffic totals over 1.7 billion requests from OpenAI alone. And we’re clearly just at the beginning of the curve, as LLMs introduce more powerful foundational models with new use cases.

Agentic AI, which made waves with the launch of OpenAI Operator earlier this year, has been quietly maturing in the background. While use cases like ticket purchases and restaurant reservations are still emerging, they’re rapidly moving from concept to reality, and could soon become a standard part of the online checkout experience, driving decisions, executing transactions, and interacting directly with your platform.

Why AI traffic is a problem for publishers & e-commerce

If you’re like many publishers or e-commerce businesses, you’re grappling with the ramifications of this booming new AI traffic source, from imploding inbound search traffic to skewed downstream marketing metrics. Worse, ad revenue or product revenue might be down. And you don’t have any visibility into what that traffic is, where it comes from, and what it’s trying to do.

Uncontrolled AI and bot traffic leads to:

• Lower SEO rankings as content is scraped and duplicated
• Declining traffic and engagement from real users
• Lost ad and product revenue due to misattributed performance
• Polluted analytics, making decision-making harder
• Easier fraud and abuse through exposed, unmonitored endpoints

From challenge to opportunity: Turning AI traffic into revenue

Now, there’s an opportunity to capitalize in a new way.

Since early this year, DataDome has been able to detect, classify, and show LLM crawler and agentic AI traffic. This capability is firmly in our bot management wheelhouse and has helped our customers gain valuable visibility into previously unknown traffic hitting their sites. With those insights, organizations have been able to take precise, policy-driven action by traffic source and endpoint—whether applying rate limiting, time-boxing, or even fully blocking unwanted AI traffic.

Thanks to our partnerships with Tollbit and Skyfire, DataDome has enabled enterprises to protect the integrity of their content deals and monetize the AI traffic visiting their websites, mobile apps, and APIs. Our dashboard provides a new “Monetize” response policy option, so you can configure it by AI/LLM provider, whether OpenAI, Perplexity, Amazon, or others you want to put behind a paywall.

What to evaluate in an AI monetization solution

Other players are also jumping into this space and making noise. Keep in mind a few things to consider when evaluating a technical partner:

• Is your content hosted on more than one cloud or CDN platform?
  Using multiple per-platform policies will increase complexity and overhead, not to mention mistakes. You may need a solution that spans across multiple providers to enable simpler, more consistent security. 
• Do you want flexibility in your monetization partners?
  You may want to choose multiple partners based on factors like business model, technical stack, and geographic coverage, and not be locked in to one.
• How important is detection accuracy to you?
  Basic detection means unintentionally blocking legitimate traffic that may have turned into sales as well as letting AI traffic pass through unmonetized. You can’t monetize what you can’t see. Deploy a solution you can count on.

The open web doesn’t have to mean open season on publishers and content creators. This new model is healthy for such businesses and provides a mechanism to gain value from your content.

How DataDome helps with AI traffic monetization

DataDome’s Cyberfraud Protection Platform stops all unwanted automation—bots, AI agents, LLM crawlers, and malicious traffic—while keeping legitimate activity seamless and secure for real users.

As AI agents and LLM traffic become a constant presence for online businesses and publishers, managing them is becoming increasingly complex—especially since bots are used for nefarious purposes too, such as data scraping, price monitoring, and fraud.

And now with DataDome & our AI monetization partners, TollBit and Skyfire, you can turn AI traffic into revenue—going beyond protection to unlock new opportunities for monetizing AI activity.

Request a demo today to see how DataDome protects your platform and helps you transform AI traffic into revenue.