TollBit vs You.com

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).

Knowledge: Live Stock Prices, Sports, Crypto, And More. Now In Web Search. Same $5 CPM.

You.com has launched a new 'Knowledge' feature for its Web Search API, adding live stock prices, crypto, weather, and prediction markets at the same $5 CPM price point. The company also announced a partnership with Pydantic AI for agent orchestration and released several new developer guides and product updates.

Richard Socher's Recursive Raises $4.65B Seed for Self-Improving AI

In a podcast episode, Richard Socher discusses his new venture, Recursive, which raised a $4.65B seed round to develop self-improving AI systems. Socher outlines his vision of a 'Eureka Machine' that can automate AI research itself, compressing years of human work into weeks. He details early results where Recursive's system outperformed humans and other agents on optimization tasks like NanoChat, NanoGPT, and NVIDIA GPU kernels. He critiques Anthropic's constitutional AI approach as ineffective and advocates for open-source models as geopolitical soft power. He also shares his framework of ten 'spaces of intelligence' and discusses the potential of AI for driving scientific breakthroughs in areas like energy, materials, and biology.

• Recursive raised a $4.65B seed round.
• Richard Socher is the founder of Recursive, You.com, and AIX Ventures.
• Recursive's AI system outperformed humans and agents on optimization tasks in under two days.

You.com announces the Answer API: grounded, cited answers powered by real-time web search

You.com introduces the Answer API, providing grounded, cited answers powered by real-time web search. The new API is now available and featured on the homepage.