PAISTRY vs TollBit

Paistry founder Alen Nazarian wants to make publisher content dynamic with AI

In an interview with MEEDIA, Alen Nazarian, founder of Paistry and former CTO of SevenOne Media, discusses his startup's mission to make the open web fit for the AI era. Paistry develops a platform that allows publishers and brands to transform their content into intelligent, interactive user experiences, including interactive journalism, new ad formats, and personalized product advice. The company has already conducted pilot projects with two publishers and tested AI agents with various brands. Nazarian emphasizes the importance of publishers retaining control over their content and monetization, rejecting robots.txt as ineffective, and advocating for a federated data network to enable controlled, paid access for external AI systems. He predicts a shift from attention-based advertising to monetizing concrete user needs, with AI agents potentially handling purchases in the future.

• Paistry is a startup founded by Alen Nazarian, former CTO of SevenOne Media, aiming to make publisher content dynamic with AI.
• Paistry has conducted pilot projects with two publishers and tested AI agents with various brands.
• The platform enables interactive journalism, new ad formats, and personalized product advice.

The Netacea + TollBit Integration is Now Live

We’re excited to announce our new integration with Netacea, the Bot and Agent Trust Management company for commerce and content. Together, we’re helping website owners enforce access rules and unlock new revenue streams from the surging amount of AI bot traffic hitting their sites.

European publishers face heavier AI bot scraping

TollBit's H1 2026 analysis of 3,906 publishers (456 European) using a >987 billion-visit dataset found a sharp rise in AI-powered scraping: more than 22 billion bot accesses, about 1.9 billion events that bypassed or ignored robots.txt, and scraping up ~20% from January to June. European sites endure roughly four times the median AI scrapes of North American peers and far fewer human referrals from AI apps; TollBit measured about 179 automated page fetches per human referral and the scrape-to-referral ratio climbed from 150:1 in Q1 to 227:1 in Q2. Only 0.05% of external referrals to the European cohort came from AI apps (Google supplied ~84%), and AI-driven referrals generate far fewer clicks. Tests of commercial scrapers retrieved content on nearly all tested sites. Cloudflare has started blocking training crawlers on new domains and plans finer bot classifications and paid access from September 2026.

• Scope: TollBit analyzed H1 2026 across 3,906 publishers (456 European) within a >987 billion-visit dataset and identified >22 billion AI-bot accesses.
• Europe disproportionately affected: median AI scrapes per site ~4x higher than North America; scraping rose ~20% Jan–Jun 2026; overall measured ratio ~179 bot fetches per human referral, rising from 150:1 in Q1 to 227:1 in Q2.
• Referrals: only 0.05% of external referrals to the European cohort came from AI applications; Google supplied ~84% of referrals; AI chatbot referrals generate far fewer click-throughs than classic search (~96% fewer reported).