The Washington Post’s Arc XP adds TollBit to help publishers make money from AI bot traffic

Arc XP customers will be able to use TollBit’s 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’s paywall that charges for crawling. The alternative would be a multi-step engineering approach, according to Arc XP’s CTO Joe Croney.

“Dozens of our customers have been asking for this,” Croney said. “Our customers started coming to us with a high demand around bot monetization, bot blocking, bot management and we have a couple services already – but none of them had the magic sauce of TollBit, really bringing that monetization market.”

A recent, growing surge of bot traffic has become a real problem for publishers. According to TollBit’s latest “State of the Bots” report, 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 — by Q4, this grew to 1 AI bot visit for every 31 human visits.

Arc XP customers saw a “dramatic rise” in AI bot traffic over the last two years, Croney said. “I saw it first in my bills from our CDN provider. I thought there was a problem, that’s how rapid the growth was – and then our customers saw that too,” he added. 

Arc XP’s CDN saw a 300% year-over-year jump in AI-driven bot traffic, according to a company blog post from last July. Media and publishing sites were particularly affected – they were seven-times more likely to see AI bot traffic than the average website. 

Arc XP hosts more than 2,500 media websites, according to Janet Jaiswal, Arc XP’s vp of marketing. It offers its own tools and an integration with cybersecurity and bot blocking company DataDome to help its clients block malicious and bot traffic. But this TollBit deal gives the publishers who use Arc XP a way to make money from the flood of bot traffic, Croney said.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, uses Arc XP’s publishing platform and plans to adopt TollBit’s tools with this integration to charge AI bots for access to their content, according to Matt Boggie, chief technology and product officer.

Making bots pay

Nearly 20% of TollBit’s network of nearly 7,000 publisher sites has made money from its AI bot paywall, ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands a month, according to Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of TollBit. TollBit and Arc XP will not charge publisher clients for using these tools.

Croney and Panigrahi also argued that this integration helps make it faster and easier for tech companies to get the information they want for their AI systems. TollBit can format publishers’ content into markdown (the common language used by AI systems and agents), which gives LLMs structured, essential information in a format that’s faster, cheaper and easier to understand and use.

“[Our media customers were] seeking ways to replace advertising revenue and slowing subscription revenue with new models, and being part of that AI economy was top of mind,” Croney said. “The partnership’s not just about protection, it’s about that growth opportunity.”