A.I. agents generated nearly 25 billion requests across the DataDome network in the third quarter of 2026, a 41.5 percent jump over the preceding three months, according to the bot-management firm’s AI Traffic Report published Oct. 15. The headline figure is less interesting than its composition. A rising share of that traffic is no longer crawling for training data. It’s trying to buy things.

Agentic browsers, the subcategory covering software that navigates sites on behalf of a human user, rose 4.7-fold in September alone, from 12.5 million requests in August to 58.2 million the following month. ChatGPT’s cloud browser led the segment with 27.4 million September requests. Then Meta shipped Muse.

Made fully available on Sept. 22, Muse captured roughly 33 percent of the agentic browser category within nine days of DataDome’s measurement window, generating 29.1 million requests in its first twelve days. Its routing profile is the part operators should read twice: 99.3 percent of sampled Muse traffic originated from cloud and content-delivery infrastructure, with 81.2 percent from Cloudflare, 18.1 percent from Fastly, and only 0.6 percent from residential networks. Muse also doesn’t identify itself as an A.I. assistant in its request headers.

“Muse is the first mass-market example of where agentic traffic is heading. Policies that trust residential or ISP-based traffic won’t catch agents like this,” said Jerome Segura, vice president of threat research at DataDome.

The commercial surface area is already meaningful. In DataDome’s Muse sample, 8.9 percent of requests touched forms, login pages, payment endpoints, account-creation flows, or shopping carts: roughly 202,600 form submissions, 24,800 login attempts, 9,600 payment-page visits, 6,800 account-creation requests, and 5,200 cart interactions. Small-business operators who reflexively block cloud-originating traffic are, increasingly, blocking shoppers.

Meta’s two declared crawlers still dominate the broader category, generating 12.4 billion requests in Q3 for 49.7 percent of the total, down slightly from 51.5 percent in Q2. The directional story is that non-Meta agents are growing faster, and the fastest-growing ones don’t announce themselves.

Earlier reporting on Muse described cases in which the agent reached live staff on the other end of a call. Separately, recent research found that A.I. answer engines fail to surface most small-business listings at all. Taken together, the picture is of a buying journey whose first and sometimes only human-adjacent touchpoint is a piece of software the merchant can neither see nor identify.

DataDome’s figures are drawn from its own network and haven’t been independently audited; PPC Land noted the firm didn’t disclose the size of its Muse sample. The baseline, caveats and all, is the one Q4 planning will be built on.

Sources