Bombora’s Data Co-op: persistent strength through diversity in an AI-driven world

Since we shared our point of view in August 2025, the chatter about AI has only gotten louder. Thought leaders wring their hands about a ‘zero-click’ future in which publishers and brands are at the mercy of gatekeeping generative AI tools that control the outcomes of digital discovery. No doubt AI is shaping content consumption just as innovations are always apt to change behaviors, but is the change as radical or as universal as some would lead us to believe?

Here at Bombora we are looking closely at the impact of gen AI on B2B research behaviors: the ability to engage valuable authenticated audiences and to observe behavioral signals across these audiences at scale.

Spoiler alert: Accounts and the B2B buying groups that serve them are still doing a lot of research and consuming a lot of content. While AI may handle initial discovery, the high-intent consumption that actually influences a purchase decision remains concentrated in authoritative publisher and brand destinations.

Further, the agentic future is not a foregone conclusion; publishers and brands are not sitting back and watching. They are taking a proactive approach to protecting their IP, fighting off unauthentic bot traffic, and engaging their most valuable first party audiences.

Our view across the Bombora
Data Co-op

At Bombora we have a unique view on traffic and digital content consumption patterns as the steward of our one-of-a-kind B2B Data Cooperative. The Co-op is a living asset made up of almost 6,000 publisher and brand sites. We have added hundreds of incremental B2B sites over the past two years. Our member retention rate is close to 100%.

Through the Co-op we see traffic across publishers and B2B brands and continually monitor media consumption patterns for tens of thousands of research topics. And importantly, we talk with our publisher and brand partners on the front line every day.

Overall, Bombora’s one-of-a-kind data cooperative remains healthy and representative of the B2B ecosystem as AI and AI-driven search continues to evolve. Tracking data shows that:

• Co-op traffic remains strong overall.
  Traffic to a representative control group of ~600 publishers grew +~1% in 2025 v. 2024. Total traffic in the Co-op grew much more, when accounting for new Co-op members.
• The strength of our topic signals continues to grow even as we expand our topic taxonomy.
  In Jan -Feb of 2026 (2 months):
  • Our 20,100+ topics had coverage by 49,000 URLs (on average).
  • 24% of these topics had coverage from more than 49,000 URLs.
  • URL density/ topic grew 1.2X versus the same time period in 2025 even while we grew our topic taxonomy by 11% (from 18K to 20K).

Not surprisingly, different types of publishers are experiencing the impact of AI-driven search differently: When analyzing a static control set of broadscale and specialty publishers, it is clear that AI-driven search is impacting different segments of the Co-op in distinct ways:

• Broadscale publishers (e.g., news sites): Traffic is declining steadily. In the second half of 2025, traffic was 16% lower than the first half of the year, and 25% lower than the same period in 2024 (H2) . (Note: controlling for agent/ bot traffic.)
• Specialty publishers: Traffic is holding steady. In the second half of 2025,, traffic was 1.6% higher than the first half of the year, and 9% higher than the same period in 2024 (H2) (Note: controlling for agent/bot traffic.)

*Source: Bombora Data Co-op

Traditional search referrals from search engines like Google are declining. On average, page views generated by search referrals have dropped 13% over the past six months when compared to the preceding 12 months. When compared to stable specialty publisher traffic, this data suggests a shift in how professionals are conducting research. AI summaries are handling the early, informational questions, but buyers still head to specific ‘destination’ sites as they get closer to a decision

*Source: Bombora Data Co-op

Agent/ bot traffic on publisher sites has increased +500% in the final months of 2025. This said, agent traffic it is a small piece of overall page views (only 6%)

*Source: Bombora Data Co-op

What we think

In recent months we have been asked: is the intent data market at risk? And our answer is: perhaps, for some providers.

The rise of AI-driven search and the evolving landscape underscores yet again the truth that not all Intent data is created equal. Source, and proximity to the source, really matter. Intent collection models that rely on single/ limited sources will be challenged to maintain adequate and/ or representative signals as traffic is bottlenecked at AI summaries or siloed into LLMs. Providers that rely heavily on the bidstream as a source for intent have always been challenged by their lack of visibility and distance from the originating behavior. Bidstream-dependent intent models can not capture the richness of behavioral data (scroll velocity, time on page) that allows Bombora to evaluate the relative level of Intent and rely solely on the “thin file” of the presence of key words.

We are confident that our model –  a highly diversified, multi-organization Co-op, powered by first party tags placed directly on publisher and brands sites – is positioned well to continue to serve the Intent and broader B2B data market. We can weather changes in B2B research behavior and traffic and content consumption and still create durable, efficacious signals that will power our clients.

Our path forward

First and foremost, we remain committed to our Data Co-op model and to deriving data solutions from this B2B ecosystem for the benefit of the entire community—publishers, event companies, show organizers, brands, and partners. As the landscape continues to evolve, we will evolve our model—incorporating more sources, different sources, and new validation techniques in partnership with our Co-op members.

Expand and diversify the Co-op

We continue to focus on growing and diversifying the mix of publishers and brands in the Data Co-op. We are also seeking publishers and partners with ‘AI-resilient’ signal data including, but not limited to, organizations that specialize in events. To be clear, expanding the Co-op has been a consistent focus since its origination more than 11 years ago. We have a strong pipeline of Co-op candidates seeking Bombora’s data solutions and the consultative support that we provide during this disruptive time.

Identify and combat agent traffic in partnership with our Co-op members

Intent data needs to be derived from authentic site traffic that represents real B2B research. While the world may change, at this time we do not believe that bot or Agent traffic is being used to conduct true research. Given this we are taking steps to identify and address bot traffic.

Bombora’s AI models are continuously trained to detect bot traffic. We use our detection tools to ensure the integrity of Company Surge^® Intent (we do not classify events generated by a bot for Company Surge^®) and to give our Co-op members insights on the behavior of bot traffic just as we do human-driven traffic.

Our data integrity is bolstered by our Co-op members’ investments in bot protection. Since our collection tag sits natively on their sites, we effectively ‘piggyback’ on their anti-scraping and bot mitigation efforts, helping us ingest cleaner, human-first data.