The new reality of automated traffic

Automation isn’t new — what’s new is how invisible it’s become. AI agents, fetchers, and crawlers are now woven into the fabric of online interaction. Yet the web’s core trust mechanisms haven’t kept up, leaving most websites unable to tell whether a bot is verified, spoofed, or malicious.

So the question becomes: How can we prove a bot is really what it claims to be — cryptographically, at scale, and in real time?

Introducing Web Bot Authentication

Web Bot Authentication (Web Bot Auth) is an emerging standard that allows bots to prove their identity via cryptographic signatures embedded in standard HTTP messages. A verified bot, such as an AI search crawler or fetcher, signs its HTTP requests with a private key.…