Executive summary
About 25 billion AI agent requests in Q3 2026, up 41.5% from 17.7 billion in Q2; agentic browser requests rose from about 12.5 million in August to 58.2 million in September, with Meta's Muse accounting for 19.5 million September requests.
Key findings
- 25bn AI agent requests grew
Up 41.5% from 17.7 billion in Q2: 6.23 billion in July, 9.18 billion in August, 9.58 billion in September. - 49.7% Meta's crawlers lead
Share of AI agent traffic; ClaudeBot grew 159% to 2.3 billion requests. - 58.2M Agentic browsers surged
September requests, from about 12.5 million in August. - 8.9% Muse sample hit sensitive flows
Share of sampled Muse requests reaching forms, logins, payment, account creation or cart flows; 99.3% came from Cloudflare and Fastly infrastructure.
Methodology
Traffic crossing DataDome's bot-management network from July to September 2026. DataDome attributes traffic to Muse without explaining how; Muse runs in cloud virtual machines and does not identify itself as an AI agent.
DataDome published the report on October 15, 2026; VP of Threat Research Jerome Segura wrote it. PPC Land reported it.
How to read it
The figures come from traffic crossing DataDome’s bot-management network and are not audited. The report does not give the number of sites, the Muse sample size or the detection method, and Profound has claimed Muse routes through residential connections, which contradicts DataDome’s sample.