Following its recent partnership with ProRata, Man of Many, Australia’s largest men’s lifestyle publication, today announces a new collaboration with AI analytics company TollBit, to monitor, measure, and ultimately monetise large-scale scraping by generative AI bots.
The integration is already live, delivered through a lightweight Cloudflare Worker that runs at the network edge. This means no code changes to Man of Many’s headless WordPress stack and negligible impact on site speed. The Worker tags every request, allowing Man of Many to see, in real time, which bots are crawling its articles, how often, and what value is being extracted.
The announcement coincides with the release of TollBit’s Q1 2025 State of the Bots report, a quarterly snapshot of AI scraping trends across their publisher domains. Key findings include:
- 2.5X: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (“RAG”) bots now outpace training bots, with RAG
scraping traffic up forty-nine per cent quarter on quarter. - +87%: AI bot traffic on sites with analytics almost doubled in Q1.
- 26 Million: Scrapes that bypassed robots.txt in March alone, as the share of uncooperative bots jumped from 3.3% to 12.9%.
- +732%: Increase in visits to TollBit’s Bot Paywall as publishers seek active defences beyond the honour system
Scott Purcell, co-founder of Man of Many, said, “Generative AI is rewriting the rules of content discovery. We will not shut the door on bots because visibility inside new platforms is critical for audience growth, yet original journalism has value and deserves fair reward. By partnering with TollBit, we gain forensic insight into who is consuming our work and the tools to negotiate payment when the market is ready.”
TollBit’s Partnerships Lead, Cody McCauley, added, “Man of Many is a forward-thinking publisher that understands both the risk and the opportunity in the zero-click AI world. Our Cloudflare deployment gives them full transparency today, and a path to usage-based licensing tomorrow, without forcing them to block traffic.”
Man of Many sees TollBit’s value for Australian publishers in measurement and leverage rather than in closing doors to AI. The platform gives the title real-time insight into which AI bots are accessing its articles and how often, an essential advantage when smaller independent outlets rarely secure direct dialogue with overseas AI model operators and platforms. Despite public assurances from C-suite AI leaders that they support the wider publishing ecosystem, meaningful agreements with publishers of this scale remain scarce. By providing robust, network-wide data, TollBit lays the groundwork for collective bargaining and future commercial standards while ensuring independent journalism stays visible in search and chat experiences.
