Condé Nast, Hearst among 300 media execs to push federal ‘bad bots’ bill on AI scraping

Executives will head to Capitol Hill and meet with senators, other members of Congress and their staff to discuss the issue: stealth crawlers often ignore or circumvent publishers’ tactics to prohibit content scraping without their permission –— and because they do not self-identify, this makes it very difficult for publishers to weed them out or block them.

Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast; Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines and board chair of News/Media Alliance; Mike Reed, CEO of USA Today Co; Pat Dorsey, publisher of the Santa Fe New Mexican and the chair of America’s Newspapers; and Alan Fisco, president and CEO of The Seattle Times and president of America’s Newspapers, are among those making the trip.

“The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act is a meaningful step toward greater transparency regarding how publisher content is accessed and used. While AI presents tremendous opportunities for innovation and audience engagement, original journalism must be properly valued. AI depends on a strong and healthy journalism ecosystem, which is why publishers deserve attribution, control, and fair compensation when their work contributes to AI products,” Reed said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

On Wednesday, News/Media Alliance and America’s Newspapers execs will host a day of programming for publishers and members of Congress. They also attended a dinner hosted by the News/Media Alliance on Monday evening.

The D.C. fly-in has been an annual News/Media Alliance initiative for years, but president and CEO Danielle Coffey said this year’s trip is on a different scale, with roughly twice as many executives and an extra day of programming compared to last year — a reflection of how urgent publishers now see the AI scraping fight. Last year’s fly-in centered on urging Congress to protect publishers’ content and ensure news organizations are compensated when their work is used by tech and AI companies.

Conversations from last year’s meetings inspired the creation of the “bad bots bill,” to give lawmakers something tangible to support, Coffey said. Media execs are hoping the show of force will help educate members of Congress on the “bad bots” issue publishers are facing and build support for the bill as Congress returns to session.

“By coming together and speaking with one voice, we have a stronger opportunity to build support for legislation that will help create a healthier information ecosystem,” said Hearst’s Chirichella in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Coffey said the fly-in is particularly effective because the publishing execs attending the meetings on Capitol Hill often have deep ties to the communities lawmakers represent. “They’re all having the same experiences. Too many of these bots are coming on their sites. They can’t handle the traffic because they’re too small. If they can even handle it, if they’re larger, it’s stealing their content. It’s undermining the marketplace.”

The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act was introduced to Congress in July. A similar bill, called the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act, was passed in New York in June. News/Media Alliance has backed both measures, which require bots to identify themselves and disclose their purpose, though the federal bill extends beyond news publishers to websites and digital platforms generally.

Bot traffic has outpaced human traffic to websites this year, and the sheer scale of bot scraping is growing. Cloudflare data shows bots now make up over 60% of overall internet traffic. In its latest report, TollBit detected more than 22 billion AI bot scrapes across the sites it analyzed in the first half of 2026, out of over 987 billion total website visits analyzed. AI bot traffic on TollBit-tracked publisher sites surged throughout 2025, with the ratio of AI bot visits to human visits rising from roughly 1 in 200 in Q1 to 1 in 31 by Q4 — a more than sixfold increase. 

Coffey hopes the bill can be “the foundational cleanup that needs to happen for the marketplace to function,” she said. Once stealth crawlers must identify themselves, publishers can block them and control their content, and then enter licensing deals with AI companies, Coffey said. 

“The bill is a means to an end,” she said.

David Buttle, founder of publisher AI coalition SPUR, agreed that copyright litigation could reinforce the pressure created by the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act. A win for the New York Times in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, along with lawsuits targeting third-party scrapers, could establish precedents that increase the legal risk of scraping. 

The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act would address a related but distinct part of the problem. Buttle said it could raise the cost and legal risk of stealth scraping. The bill specifically targets subterfuge: bots posing as human users, using residential IP proxies and scraping services to bypass technical controls. Its goal is to shift the economics so scraping, including its legal risk and circumvention costs, becomes more costly than licensing directly from publishers. If effective, it could deter a significant volume of undeclared scraping and help create the conditions for a viable AI licensing market. 

“Companies are currently paying for content but they’re paying intermediary scraping services to do this, rather than publishers,” he added. 

Stealth bots are one of three core ways publishers’ content is being used without fair payment. Buttle defines the other two as platforms that ignore publishers’ robots.txt signals, a problem SPUR is working on; and Google’s use of publisher content. 

“Google is using it with permission, but the permission is extracted coercively because they tie use of content for search to use of content for AI,” he added.

— Jessica Davies contributed reporting to this story.