HUMAN Security and TollBit partner to empower publishers with tools to block unauthorized AI bots, enforce content rules, and establish sustainable revenue streams through fair compensation.
AI companies have been training their models using publishers’ content without asking or paying for it, making publishers angry enough to sue and complain to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. While some AI companies have started signing deals to properly license content, many publishers are still looking for better solutions. A new partnership between HUMAN Security and TollBit might help fix this problem.
These companies are teaming up to give publishers more control by stopping unauthorized AI bots from taking their content, enforcing their website’s bot rules, and creating ways to profit fairly from their content.
Creating Sustainable Revenue Streams for Publishers
TollBit, which started in 2023, built a platform where AI tools can properly pay websites for content they use. They designed the platform to replace unauthorized scraping with a legitimate system that works for everyone, helping keep the content industry sustainable as AI becomes more prevalent.
A key goal of the partnership is to compensate publishers without costly legal battles. For instance, through their combined technology, publishers can see which AI agents access their content and set up a paywall requiring them (as well as other scraping bots) to pay to access their content. This, in effect, allows publishers to manage enterprise-level partnerships with AI developers and establish consistent revenue streams, all while side-stepping costly legal actions.
The combined offering will also give publishers visibility into the AI agents that access their content, enforce strict access rules, and even block unwanted scrapers. For instance, many publishers use a robots.txt file to tell web crawlers and bots which parts of their sites they can and cannot access. Through the partnership, publishers can enforce granular policies to prevent unauthorized content scraping or summarization.
The technology continuously learns to identify new AI agents, ensuring only paying customers can access content while blocking unauthorized scrapers. This creates a sustainable revenue stream for publishers while protecting their digital assets from unauthorized use.
“We’re thrilled to join forces with TollBit to enhance their bot paywall with sophisticated bot detection and advanced robot.txt enforcement for known and unknown bots,” said Apurva Joshi, Chief Product Officer at HUMAN, in a press release. “With TollBit’s AI monetization infrastructure built on HUMAN’s unparalleled detection models, we’re continuing to block malicious scrapers while also enabling authorized AI agents to seamlessly pay publishers for content access. This advances our vision and capabilities to mitigate, control, and monetize unwanted traffic, further empowering publishers to protect their digital content and unlock new revenue streams.”
How Services Are Delivered
HUMAN and TollBit deliver their services via an integration between the two platforms. HUMAN directly serves TollBit’s bot paywall to AI agents on customers’ applications. This seamlessly protects publishers’ content while providing a mechanism for AI companies to discover and access the content appropriately. Here’s how it works:
- Collect. HUMAN collects 2,500-plus indicators, including network, device, behavioral, credentials, transactions, and customer-provided signals.
- Detect. HUMAN analyzes the data signals and detects automated activity using behavioral analysis, profile deviation models, and more than 400 machine learning algorithms.
- Enforce. If an AI bot is detected that is not on the customer’s allow list, HUMAN sends that bot to TollBit’s paywall.
- Report. Dashboards show traffic from known bots and crawlers, including their exact target paths.
Generative AI fundamentally transformed the digital content landscape in November 2022, sparking an industry-wide reckoning. Like all major shifts, it has brought new challenges that require new solutions to ensure fairness and balance. As the industry evolves, establishing standardized ways for AI companies to access and compensate publishers for their content will be crucial. This could create a more sustainable digital ecosystem where both publishers and AI companies can thrive while respecting intellectual property rights and ensuring fair compensation for valuable content.