Libération Leverages DataDome + Arc XP to Neutralize Malicious AI Scraping in <2 Milliseconds

Libération is a French newspaper with over 1 million daily readers and more than 120k subscribers. Faced with a surge in AI scrapers and lacking clear visibility into non-human traffic, they needed instant observability and control over their website. Since they were using Arc XP, a publisher-focused platform with a CMS at its core, they took advantage of its native integration with DataDome to deploy Bot Protect. With just a few clicks, they started blocking unauthorized automated traffic within minutes, preserving their content and protecting it from theft.

The challenge: Content theft from AI crawlers and scrapers

“As a news organization, we create information for humans, not for bots, crawlers, or AI agents,” says Lucas Delcroix, CTO at Libération. The publisher reaches readers across its site, mobile app, and print edition, with a distinctive focus on culture alongside politics, economics, and society. 

Like many media companies, Libération uses a paywall to protect a portion of its content, but unauthorized crawlers (often AI-powered) and copycat sites increasingly scrape public pages at scale. By doing so, they bypass ads and consume bandwidth, with little or no benefit to the company. 

Legal remedies can take years to materialize. “We can’t wait on legal solutions from France or Europe; we need to protect ourselves now, before the content is stolen,” Lucas says.

After adopting Arc XP’s platform, built specifically for newsrooms, Libération’s product and engineering teams still lacked a “readable” view of non-human traffic. “We were a bit blind regarding technical traffic: requests, tools, clients. We didn’t really know which tools or non-human actors were accessing our site and copying content,” Lucas explains. Without proper bot detection, even simple mitigations were slow, and abusers could change tactics before protections landed.

The solution: DataDome + Arc XP for instant observability and protection

Due to aggressive scraping and content theft, Libération knew they needed to find a proper solution and turned to DataDome. 

“After meeting with DataDome’s team, seeing their customer references, and learning that our CMS, Arc XP, had formed a partnership with DataDome, we felt confident we wanted to work with them,” explains Lucas.

The implementation went off without a hitch. “We simply added a secret key to the Arc XP integration, and it worked instantly,” he notes. Time to value: less than five minutes.

From there, the team gained the visibility they were missing. “Implementing DataDome gave us clear observability,” Lucas explains. “We feel more confident about our traffic and how the site is consumed.” 

Collaboration with DataDome stayed light but effective, with use-case reviews and best-practice discussions. “It’s clear and simple to work with the team,” he adds.

The results: No more scraping, secured content, and peace of mind

Once DataDome was in place, Libération was finally able to accurately analyze the composition of its traffic. Between January and May 2026 alone, DataDome blocked 565 million malicious requests—an average of 113 million per month—from bots, crawlers, and AI agents storing content or running queries linked to manipulation or fraud. 

DataDome’s visibility also revealed that unauthorized scraping attempts surged by 86% between January and May 2026. “We’ve even seen crypto fake sites that mimic Libération to trick users, as another example of misuse,” says Lucas.

Now, his engineers can distinguish at a glance between human visitors, major legitimate crawlers, contracted partners, unauthorized AI agents, and scrapers. “We’ve gone from being victims to observers,” explains Lucas. “We can see exactly which tools are crawling our website and decide what to allow or block.”

Operationally, the benefits were immediate. Thanks to the partnership between DataDome and Arc XP, Libération now neutralizes malicious traffic in <2 milliseconds.

This change has also increased the team’s bandwidth, resulting in significant time savings and reduced excessive resource consumption from unwanted automated traffic.

For the team, the protection also brings peace of mind. “One of the great things about DataDome is that we don’t have to think about it: we feel protected around the clock,” explains Lucas.

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