News publishers across the country are struggling with a uniquely modern problem – their webpages are being overrun with bots that disguise their identity and steal content. Content that is written for human readers is being scraped by millions of these automated crawlers that comb the internet and obscure their identity and purpose to evade detection, causing harm and degrading the quality of the information ecosystem.

These uninvited “bad bots,” many of whom come from China or other countries, are slowing down publishers’ pages for users and undermining a healthy content licensing market that would support continued community coverage, ultimately impacting countless newsrooms’ ability to serve their readers.