Federal Reserve routes select data to FRED as AI traffic surges
All users of Federal Reserve data will be directed to FRED starting now, as AI-driven visits grow to half of traffic.
Governor Waller announced that users seeking certain data published by the Federal Reserve Board will soon be routed to the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) platform and its tools.
FRED now hosts more than 850,000 data series from governments and other sources worldwide and recorded 18 million unique users in 2025. Traffic is growing 150 percent a year, with roughly half of visits originating from AI agents.
The Governor highlighted that artificial intelligence can locate, summarize and visualize data faster than individuals, but also warned that AI can hallucinate, introduce bias, misattribute sources and confuse correlation with causation.
To address these challenges, FRED introduced the FRED MCP Connector, which uses the Model Context Protocol to let users retrieve data through a "bring-your-own-AI" approach. The connector is designed to present data in a format that AI agents can interpret accurately.
The Fed's data teams are also linking FRED with the FRASER archival library and the ALFRED historical series, so AI queries can include original documents and earlier revisions of economic data.
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