Meta launched Muse about a month ago. Within days, the questions started pouring in, from customers and from companies we'd never spoken to.
One customer told us they'd blocked it at their CDN. It worked, and then it didn't.
I get it. Muse doesn't introduce itself. I get it. Muse mostly doesn't introduce itself. Meta has started signing a small share of its traffic with Web Bot Auth, but most of it still arrives unsigned, and there's no published IP range. When one of our engineers tried it from his iPhone, the traffic that reached the site came from a Linux machine in a cloud data center, wearing the same Chrome user agent as everyone else.
It's built to look like an ordinary visitor. So is most of the automation we've been catching for the last ten years. We've never used CAPTCHAs, so we've always had to tell from the browser itself, whatever it claims to be. We found what gives Muse away, and it’s in the Verified Bots and AI Agent directory for every customer.
Across our network, agent traffic is up 1320% on last year, and Muse is a big reason why.
So much has already been written about what Muse is and how to spot it. I want to talk about what matters once you can.
Muse isn't the user
Every Muse session runs on a copy of the same Meta-hosted cloud computer with a browser. As far as any device signal is concerned, millions of different people are one machine.
And they aren't just browsing.
Muse doesn't want anything, except insights from every user session. The person using it does. Most of those people are your customers. Some of them are holding someone else's password.
Allow or block is the wrong question
The industry has settled on a standard answer for agents. Keep a list, verify what you can, then flip a switch.
That's necessary, but it doesn't get you very far. Block Muse and you turn away customers who chose to shop that way. Allow it and you've let in everyone who uses it, including the people you've spent years keeping out. And the moment an agent is allowed in, it becomes the thing attackers dress up as.
