Tollbit ‘State of the Bots: Q1’ Cover Art

TollBit’s Q1 State of the Bots report offers a comprehensive and unflinching analysis of AI scraping activity across the web—highlighting emerging patterns, key players, and rising threats in automated data collection.

For the report’s cover, Talia Cotton was invited to design a custom data visualization that translates one of the report’s most telling findings into a powerful visual narrative. Drawing from TollBit’s internal dataset, the team focused on user-agent traffic, spotlighting the rapid ascent of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) bots and their dominance over other bot types.

The visualization was built entirely in code, ensuring accuracy by sourcing directly from the raw data without distortion. A textured glass layer evokes the engineered opacity of AI systems, while interwoven lines hint at the increasing overlap between scraping behaviors. The result is a graphic that is both legible and unsettling—designed not just to display the data, but to make its implications felt.