Corner any publisher in the United States, and they’ll talk endlessly about the impact of AI and its bots on their business.
Now imagine what that conversation might sound like across the pond.
A recent study of AI scrapes over the first half of 2026 found that median AI scraping was four times higher in Europe than in North America, with scrapes 20% higher in June than they were in January.
“The economics of online publishers are eroding in real time, and European publishers are being hit hardest,” says Tollbit’s State of the Bots research. “Data from publishers on TollBit shows European sites get scraped more, receive fewer referrals in return, and have their robots.txt rules bypassed more often.”
(Photo Source: Tollbit)
National news was the most heavily hit category “by far,” according to Tollbit’s research, which found its content scraped ahead of sports and entertainment. And it appears no matter what category or continent, the returns are only worsening.
“It takes 179 AI bot visits to get a single human visitor referral in return from AI applications for European publishers — a rate over 3x worse than North American sites,” says the Tollbit study. “Robots.txt files were designed for an era when honoring it cost a crawler little, and defying it gained it little and cost the site little. As AI tools and traffic explode, that balance no longer holds. AI bots take publisher content, cost the sites yet serve them, yet send back very few human visitors in return.”