Two of our team are presenting at next week’s NISO Plus 2026 conference. And we’re discussing two very hot topics: AI Usage and Bot Traffic.
Michelle Urberg: Tracking AI usage
Michelle Urberg is speaking both at Monday’s pre-conference and at a dedicated session on Tuesday about the issue of Tracking Usage in the Age of AI. Our industry is starting to observe falling usage numbers as users increasingly rely on AI generated responses without interacting directly with publisher content. It’s in all our interests to ensure that usage reports fairly reflect the value provided by scholarly content, but not all AI uses are alike.
What should be tracked when the provider platform and full text is not the final destination for content usage, but instead it is an AI service? What about when a snippet of a full text or an AI-generated summary of several published pieces is where the researcher stops? Michelle will be sharing some of the analysis we’ve been doing as part of a deep-dive into agentic AI interactions.
Tim Lloyd: Managing Robotic Traffic
Tim Lloyd is speaking about the impact of robotic traffic on content and service platforms as part of the session titled Access in Flux. This session explores the changing access landscape through the lens of three topics with a particularly outsized impact: Security, Bot traffic, and AI. Anyone involved in managing delivery infrastructure over the last 12 months will have experienced a significant increase in robotic traffic – both legitimate and malicious.
The old view of bots as a manageable evil has fast been replaced by a world of aggressive crawling that cripples capacity and poisons usage stats. Tim will explore a more nuanced approach to bot management using recent granular analysis of bot traffic.
We look forward to seeing you online at NISO Plus 2026!