DataDome Report: Agentic Browser Traffic Surged Nearly 5x in a Month, as Meta’s Muse Arrived Unannounced From the Cloud

AI agent traffic grew 41.5% in Q3, while Muse generated 29 million requests in 12 days, almost entirely from cloud infrastructure

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DataDome, the leader in bot and agent trust management, today released The AI Traffic Report Q3 2026, an analysis of AI agent traffic across DataDome’s network from July through September 2026. The report finds that AI agent traffic grew 41.5% QoQ, with agentic browsers driving the latest surge, and Meta’s Muse emerging as a new kind of undeclared, cloud-hosted agent.

Nearly half of all AI agent traffic this year arrived in the last three months, and agentic browser requests jumped 4.7x in September, from 12.5 million to 58.2 million. Even without Muse, agentic browser volume tripled, with ChatGPT’s cloud browser and Claude’s browser extension both growing rapidly. Unlike crawlers that only read pages, agentic browsers take actions on them, which raises the stakes of every session.

Meta’s Muse, which spins up a remote browser in the cloud for each user, was fully available only from September 22, yet made up 33% of September’s agentic browser volume in just 9 days. Notably, Muse does not identify itself as an AI agent. In a traffic sample, more than 99% of its requests came from cloud and CDN infrastructure rather than user devices, and 8.9% touched forms, login, payment, account creation, or cart endpoints, the parts of a site that carry the most fraud risk.

“Muse is the first mass-market example of where agentic traffic is heading. It works from its own cloud virtual machine, so nearly all of its requests look like data-center traffic rather than a user’s device, and a meaningful share lands on forms and checkout flows,” said Jerome Segura, VP of Threat Research at DataDome. “Policies that trust residential or ISP-based traffic won’t catch agents like this. Organizations need to validate agent identity, understand intent, and decide deliberately which agents to allow and what they’re authorized to do.”

Beyond browsers, the broader agent landscape is diversifying. Meta still generates the most agentic traffic (49.7% of the total AI agent requests), but its share slipped from 51.5% in Q2.

Key findings:

• Agentic browser traffic jumped 4.7x in September, from 12.5 million to 58.2 million requests. Even without Muse, volume tripled to 38.7 million.
• AI agent traffic grew 41.5% QoQ. DataDome’s network processed nearly 25 billion AI agent requests in Q3 2026, up from 17.7 billion in Q2.
• Meta’s lead holds, but the mix is shifting. Meta generated 12.4 billion requests (49.7% of traffic, down from 51.5% in Q2) as non-Meta agents grew at a faster rate (+47% vs. +36.5%).
• Meta’s Muse acts from the cloud, not user devices. Muse generated 29.1 million requests in its first 12 days of full availability (September 22 to October 3). In a traffic sample, 99.3% came from cloud and CDN infrastructure, consistent with an agent that works inside its own cloud virtual machine.
• Muse reaches deeper into the customer journey. 8.9% of sampled Muse requests touched forms, login, payment, account creation, or cart endpoints.

For the full findings from DataDome’s report, click here.

Follow DataDome on YouTube and LinkedIn for regular updates from Galileo, DataDome’s threat research team, and insights on how to ensure the traffic reaching your business is traffic you can trust.

About DataDome
DataDome is the leader in bot and agent trust management, providing complete visibility and control over all traffic, whether human, bot, or AI agent. Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Bot and Agent Trust Management Software Q2 2026 and a Fast Company 2026 Next Big Things in Tech honoree, DataDome is trusted by enterprises like Etsy, PayPal, and SoundCloud. Acting as your real-time traffic control plane, DataDome’s multi-layered AI engine leverages thousands of models and 5 trillion signals daily to analyze the intent of every session in under 2 milliseconds, so only trusted traffic reaches your business, powering growth across your sites, apps, APIs, and MCP servers. A recognized Leader on G2, DataDome stops 20K+ attacks every second, ensuring traffic you can trust.