AI agents now make up half of traffic to the Fed’s FRED data site

The Federal Reserve’s most popular data website has a new core audience, and most of it isn’t human. In a speech on October 1, 2026, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller said AI agents and bots now account for approximately 50% of all traffic to FRED, the Federal Reserve Economic Data platform run by the St. Louis Fed. Bots are driving the growth curve According to Waller, automated access has been a major engine behind FRED’s traffic growth. The platform has seen annual traffic growth of approximately 150%. FRED hosts more than 850,000 economic time series, covering subjects like interest rates and inflation. Rather than fight the trend, the St. Louis Fed leaned into it. It launched the FRED MCP Connector, which uses the Model Context Protocol to let users plug their preferred AI agents directly into the database. Users can query the data in natural language instead of hunting through menus and series codes. The real risk is the AI getting it wrong Waller didn’t present this as a pure success story. He acknowledged that AI agents can do a solid job summarizing data and explaining charts. But he flagged two problems: AI agents may misattribute sources, and they can make i...