The surge in AI-driven traffic is transforming how websites manage their content. With AI bots and agents visiting sites at unprecedented rates (often scraping without permission, payment, or attribution) content owners face a critical challenge: how to protect their intellectual property while capitalizing on legitimate AI use cases.
Today, we’re excited to announce Imperva’s integration with TollBit, a groundbreaking solution that enables our Cloud Web Application Firewall (CWAF) customers to monetize traffic from AI bots and crawlers that would otherwise scrape their content without permission or compensation.
Meeting the AI Traffic Challenge
The traditional ad-supported and subscription-based content models are being disrupted by AI. This integration provides a new economic model where value flows fairly between content creators and AI developers, transforming unauthorized scraping into a sustainable revenue stream.
How Imperva and TollBit Work Together
The integration leverages Imperva’s industry-leading Web Application Firewall capabilities alongside TollBit’s analytics and monetization platform to create a comprehensive solution:
- Detection & Enforcement: Imperva CWAF identifies AI bot traffic at the edge, providing the critical first layer of protection.
- Intelligent Redirection: Using Imperva’s redirect rules, requests from AI bots are automatically redirected to a TollBit subdomain (e.g., tollbit.example.com), with CWAF returning an HTTP 302 response.
- Payment Gateway: The TollBit subdomain returns an HTTP 402 response code (payment required), prompting AI bot operators to obtain valid TollBit tokens for authorized access.
- Analytics & Insights: Through SIEM log integration, Imperva Access and Security logs flow to TollBit’s analytics engine, providing executives with clear, AI-specific analytics that show how bots are engaging with their content and the business impact of that traffic both within Tollbit and Imperva’s UMC.
Implementation Architecture
The integration requires a straightforward setup process:
- Onboard your domain to Imperva Cloud WAF
- Create a TollBit account and verify domain ownership via DNS TXT records
- Configure a TollBit subdomain with appropriate DNS NS records
- Create redirect rules in Imperva’s management console to route AI bot traffic
- Set up AWS S3 bucket integration for log processing and analytics
To ensure compatibility with TollBit’s requirements, an AWS Lambda function prefixes dates to Imperva log file names, enabling seamless ingestion into TollBit’s analytics platform.
A Shared Vision for Fair Compensation
This partnership represents a fundamental shift in how content owners approach AI traffic. Rather than simply blocking all bots or allowing unrestricted scraping, sites now have granular control to enforce access rules and pricing on their own terms.
Content owners deserve fair compensation for how their content powers the AI ecosystem. By combining Imperva’s security capabilities with TollBit’s monetization tools, we’re enabling the transition from unauthorized scraping to sustainable, licensed transactions.
What This Means for Imperva Customers
With this integration, Imperva CWAF customers gain:
- Robust protection against unauthorized AI scraping at the application layer
- Complete visibility into AI traffic patterns and behaviors through dedicated analytics
- Flexible control to decide which AI agents can access content and under what conditions
- New revenue streams that turn scraping attempts into legitimate, paid transactions
The agent economy is here, and autonomous AI visitors are becoming a permanent fixture of web traffic. With Imperva and TollBit, you can ensure these interactions happen on your terms—fairly, transparently, and profitably.
Get Started
If you’re an Imperva Cloud WAF customer and want to activate the integration:
- Create your own Tollbit account on the TollBit platform https://app.tollbit.com/sign-up.
- Create custom rules in the Imperva Cloud WAF platform as instructed in the TollBit Docs.
TollBit is free for publishers and websites so you can be up and running in no time.
Learn more about how Imperva’s integration with TollBit can help you protect and monetize your content in the AI era.
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