DataDome: Meta's crawlers drove half of Q3 AI agent traffic

AI agent traffic across DataDome’s network grew 41.5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion requests in Q3 2026, up from about 17.7 billion in Q2, per DataDome’s Q3 AI Traffic Report covered by Help Net Security. Meta’s Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-WebIndexer crawlers combined for 12.4 billion of those requests — 49.7% of the total, down from 51.5% in Q2, as non-Meta agents grew traffic faster (47% quarter over quarter) than Meta’s own crawlers did. Meta’s new agentic browser, Muse, separately logged 29.1 million requests in its first 12 days of availability (Sept. 22–Oct. 3). DataDome’s report does not break out how much of that traffic serves live AI-answer queries versus model training — a split Cloudflare data has drawn before, putting AI crawler traffic overall at 52% training versus 2.6% live answers as of June 2026.