DataDome: Meta's crawlers made 49.7% of Q3 AI agent traffic
DataDome’s Q3 2026 AI Traffic Report, built from traffic across its own customer network, found AI agent requests reached nearly 25 billion for the quarter, up 41.5% from Q2’s 17.7 billion. Meta’s two crawlers, Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-WebIndexer, generated 12.4 billion of those requests — 49.7% of all AI agent traffic DataDome recorded, down slightly from 51.5% in Q2 — while Anthropic’s ClaudeBot overtook OpenAI’s GPTBot for third place among named agents. DataDome also flagged a new Meta agent, Muse: in its first 12 days of broad availability (Sept 22–Oct 3), it logged 29.1 million requests, and in a sampled subset of that traffic, 99.3% originated from cloud or CDN infrastructure rather than end-user devices.
Why it matters: Meta's near-half share of measured AI agent traffic shows how concentrated the crawling side of AI search has become even as its own share eased slightly, while the ranking swap between Anthropic's and OpenAI's bots is the more durable signal in a single quarter's numbers.
Via Help Net Security ↗ · DataDome ↗
Posted to the wire October 19, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.