More than half of internet traffic is already automated. Now layer in AI agents that are writing RFPs, fact-checking your marketing, and starting to make purchase decisions on behalf of real humans. The bot conversation has changed.
The question stops being how do we block bots? It becomes which automated traffic is good for the business, which is bad, and who owns the call?
That's the question at the center of recent Forrester research, and it's the same question we've been pushing security and marketing leaders to answer together for a while now.
The report is Determine Trustworthy Business Traffic From AI Agents, Bots, And Scrapers To Get Marketing And Security Right (Forrester Research, Inc., February 24, 2026). The message is direct. Marketing and security can't keep operating in parallel on automated traffic. They have to operate together.
The cost of staying in silos is now a P&L item
According to Forrester, when marketing and security don't collaborate around AI agents, bots, and scrapers, the business takes four concrete hits.
Ad spend gets wasted on impressions and clicks that will never convert.
The funnel gets distorted, because automated traffic gets miscounted as either too much demand or too little, and revenue forecasts follow.
Premium content gets scraped without consent, eroding the monetization model the business just spent a decade building.
And legitimate buyer-assist agents get blanket-blocked, killing deals before sales ever sees them.
Security can't fix any of these alone. Neither can marketing. Each problem sits between the two functions, and each one costs real money.
