Reported Backfilled · Original publication August 10, 2026Agentic WebCrawlers & Content ControlsMeasurement & Economics DataDome Blog ·

Forrester Expands Bot Management Category to Bot and Agent Trust Management

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Summary

Analyst firm Forrester updated its market category to Bot and Agent Trust Management Software for Q2 2026, shifting focus from binary bot blocking to managing human-initiated AI agents and traffic intent. In an interview with DataDome, report author Sandy Carielli explained that generalist CDN and WAF vendors were excluded from the evaluation due to lack of deep agentic signal depth. Over half of surveyed enterprise buyers reported actively investigating AI agent trust use cases, driven by top-line business impacts such as LLM search indexing and automated B2B procurement.

Insight

Enterprise traffic governance is transitioning from binary bot detection to dynamic intent evaluation, recognizing that blocking human-directed AI agents can directly harm commerce and search visibility. The expansion treats automated access as a continuous trust relationship requiring deep telemetry, explicitly distinguishing specialist agent management platforms from bundled CDN or WAF security offerings.

Implication

Enterprise decision-making over crawler and agent blocking is shifting from IT security silos to cross-functional teams spanning marketing, e-commerce, and fraud. Web property owners will need tools capable of continuously evaluating agent intent and distinguishing helpful commercial agents from scraping threats or drifted behaviors.

Why it matters

As user agents increasingly act on behalf of paying consumers and business buyers, blunt crawler blocking risks choking discovery and transaction revenue rather than merely mitigating operational cost.

Evidence