By Jessica Davies • June 17, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Le Monde blocks almost every bot that tries to hit its site. Now it’s starting to think about what happens when its paying readers show up via AI agents instead of a browser.
The French news publisher now blocks almost all non-human traffic unless there’s a licensing deal in place, including Google’s AI training crawler Google Extended.
Speaking to Digiday at Fastly’s Xcelerate event in London last week, Le Monde CTO Paul Laleu, said the company is “figuring out” how to maintain its subscription partnership with readers who use AI agents rather than its homepage or app. He’s interested in early technical standards that would let an AI assistant tell Le Monde, in effect, “I’m fetching this article for a user who already pays you,” so the site can decide what to show. “I can recognize that user and be able to say: ‘this one is a subscriber, I can give him the content because he’s paying money for it,’” said Laleu. “I see that as part of the future of the web.”
