DataDome debuts Priority Protect, a virtual waiting room built for AI shopping agents

Bot and agent trust management company DataDome SAS today launched Priority Protect, a virtual waiting room product designed to sort human shoppers, authorized artificial intelligence agents and malicious bots before they reach the front of the queue during high-demand sales events.

The product extends DataDome’s existing bot detection engine into queue management, classifying every request in real time and applying separate access policies for humans, trusted AI agents and bots.

The release is seeking to address the issue where retailers and ticketing platforms are confronting a shift in how flash sales actually unfold. Traditional virtual waiting rooms were built to absorb scalability spikes from human shoppers refreshing a page. AI agents, by contrast, do not refresh but instead run continuously, react to inventory changes in milliseconds, and can hit a checkout flow at machine speed the instant a product drops.

DataDome says that during a recent midnight ticket sale for a major sporting event, 31% of queue traffic on its customer’s site was bot traffic, accounting for 2.4 million of 7.8 million requests. The company argues that conventional queue tools, which make a single admission decision when a visitor arrives and then trust the session, cannot tell the difference between a legitimate buyer and an automated agent that changes behavior once inside.

Priority Protect runs continuous in-session validation, re-evaluating visitors throughout a session and re-challenging or removing them if behavior shifts. Classification draws on 5 trillion daily signals from across DataDome’s network. Operators can set capacity, release rates and access policies for each traffic class through a dashboard or application programming interface, scope rules to specific URLs and route trusted users or approved agents into priority lanes using custom attributes.

The waiting room itself runs on the customer’s own infrastructure with branded templates, position tracking and estimated wait times, rather than redirecting shoppers to a third-party domain.

“Peak moments should drive revenue, not outages,” said Chief Product Officer Pradheep Sampath. “A virtual waiting room that cannot tell a human customer from a bot or an unauthorized AI agent has no way to guarantee fairness. Priority Protect was built with a fraud detection foundation, so businesses can guarantee that every spot in line goes to a real customer or an agent they actually trust.”

DataDome counts Etsy Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and SoundCloud Ltd. among its customers. The product launch follows DataDome’s April 2025 release of large language model detection and intent-based AI models, part of a broader pivot at the company toward distinguishing legitimate AI agents from unauthorized ones, rather than treating all automated traffic as hostile.

Priority Protect is available now. Pricing was not disclosed.

Image: DataDome