Arc XP, The Washington Post\u2019s publishing platform arm, is making it easier for publishers to turn AI bot traffic into a revenue stream, thanks to a new integration with TollBit that helps publishers block scrapers and monetize access.<\/p>\n
While a number of large publishers have signed<\/a> AI content licensing deals with tech companies, many mid and and smaller sized publishers lack the infrastructure, negotiating power and resources to do so<\/a>. The idea behind this new integration is that it\u2019ll be easier for those publishers to use TollBit\u2019s marketplace, streamlining the sign-on process through Arc XP\u2019s platform.<\/p>\n Arc XP customers will be able to use TollBit\u2019s tools to monitor and control which bots are crawling their sites for content, as well as monetize the scraping they do allow by redirecting AI bots to TollBit\u2019s paywall that charges for crawling. The alternative would be a multi-step engineering approach, according to Arc XP\u2019s CTO Joe Croney.<\/p>\n \u201cDozens of our customers have been asking for this,\u201d Croney said. \u201cOur customers started coming to us with a high demand around bot monetization, bot blocking, bot management and we have a couple services already \u2013 but none of them had the magic sauce of TollBit, really bringing that monetization market.\u201d<\/p>\n A recent, growing surge of bot traffic has become a real problem for publishers. According to TollBit\u2019s latest \u201cState of the Bots\u201d report<\/a>, AI bot scraping in the second half of 2025 grew 29 percent from Q2 to Q3, and 20 percent from Q3 to Q4 in 2025. In Q2, there was 1 AI bot visit for every 50 human visits \u2014 by Q4, this grew to 1 AI bot visit for every 31 human visits.<\/a><\/p>\n Arc XP customers saw a \u201cdramatic rise\u201d in AI bot traffic over the last two years, Croney said. \u201cI saw it first in my bills from our CDN provider. I thought there was a problem, that\u2019s how rapid the growth was \u2013 and then our customers saw that too,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n