Bot-blocking policies may frustrate real customers as AI agents act on their behalf

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A growing volume of automated web traffic now originates from AI agents acting on direct instructions from human users, blurring the traditional line between bots and customers. When a website blocks such agent-driven requests, it effectively turns away a real customer who simply cannot see why the product is failing them. However, truly autonomous crawlers that act on no one's behalf remain a legitimate blocking target, even though they are technically indistinguishable from user-initiated agents. Emerging identity standards address this gap by letting operators declare whether an agent is acting on a human's request or operating independently. The key question shifting the debate is no longer whether a request is automated, but whether a specific human initiated it.

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