Agents are hiding more, not less.
AI agents are changing how they show up. Arkose Labs founder and CEO Kevin Gosschalk walks through how the traffic mix of Meta Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct shifted between Oct. 7 and 17. Meta Muse moved from data centers only to mostly residential proxies for consumer traffic. Grok Bot stopped signing with Web Bot Auth in mid-October. Instinct has always used residential proxies. The trend: agents are moving away from the standards that would let them announce themselves, not toward them. Source: Arkose Labs Threat Research, Oct. 7 to 17, 2026.
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The systems are doing their best to maintain their invisible nature.
It was coming from Fastly and Cloudflare egress, but now it's using residential proxies.
So the standards aren't being more adopted, they're being moved away from.
The systems are doing their best to maintain their invisible nature. Muse, for instance, started as data centers only. It was coming from Fastly and Cloudflare egress, but now it's using residential proxies. It uses data centers for scheduled work, but most of the consumer use of traffic is now coming from residential proxies. Instinct was also always coming from residential proxies, and Grok Bot used to sign with Web Bot Auth, but back in mid-October it's no longer signing as Web Bot Auth anymore.
So the standards aren't being more adopted, they're being moved away from. I think that's a really important call-out to make for everyone that's hoping these systems are going to self-identify. That is not at all the trend right now.
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