"AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the web-constantly. But website owners increasingly don't want to give AI firms free rein. So they're regaining control by cracking down on crawlers."
"To do this, they're using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowed-or not-to scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some companies allegedly flout instructions."
AI models require large volumes of web data, prompting companies to crawl websites continuously. Website owners are reclaiming control by using robots.txt files to specify whether web crawlers may scrape content. A set of more than 4,000 websites was checked for responses to 63 AI-related user agents such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, and Google-Extended. Sites were classified by reputation using Media Bias/Fact Check ratings. Approximately 60% of reputable news websites blocked at least one AI crawler, while only 9.1% of sites labeled as misinformation did so. Reputable sites block an average of over 15 different AI agents.
Read at Fast Company
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