IndiaMART Halts Traffic Reporting as AI Agents Scrape Platform; Sues OpenAI Over Data Use

IndiaMART InterMESH has stopped publishing traffic metrics after AI agents became indistinguishable from genuine users, CEO Dinesh Agarwal disclosed during the Q4FY26 earnings call on April 28. The decision marks a significant fracture in the platform's self-reported health signals, long relied upon by investors and suppliers to gauge business performance. Agarwal told analysts the company now faces "so much bot traffic, so much real traffic, and so much agentic traffic" that meaningful segmentation has become impossible.

The traffic reporting suspension follows a December 2024 lawsuit filed by IndiaMART against OpenAI in the Calcutta High Court. The platform alleges OpenAI excluded it from AI-generated discovery results while deploying AI systems on three decades of proprietary behavioral data. The case raises concerns under India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, with IndiaMART arguing that no disclosed governance framework governs how its data was used to train AI models. The lawsuit positions the case as a test of whether platforms can retain control over behavioral datasets accumulated through user activity.

The pollution of IndiaMART's key metric—unique business inquiries, the number of genuine buyer requests reaching suppliers—further sharpens the stakes. Agarwal attributed registered buyer inflation to agents "writing simple agents to do multiple phone numbers, simply to scrape the website, simply send one inquiry, or read data." This dynamic undermines the platform's core value proposition: connecting verified buyers with suppliers. The case signals broader tension between platforms that built proprietary datasets over years and AI companies that now exploit that data for training without compensation or consent. The outcome could shape how Indian platforms defend data assets as AI-driven scraping intensifies.