The article discusses the evolution of search engine spiders, noting their initial positive reception for driving traffic to websites. Despite respecting robots.txt guidelines in the past, today's crawlers, particularly those behind large language models (LLMs), often ignore these restrictions. Instead of providing valuable traffic and potential customers, these bots exploit websites by stealing data, which they use for applications or sell, fundamentally changing the impact of crawling technology from a beneficial tool to a source of data theft.
Search engine spiders have become increasingly intrusive, often ignoring robots.txt which traditionally set boundaries for crawler activity, leading to data theft rather than valuable traffic.
The initial perception of search engine spiders was positive, welcomed by site owners for driving traffic, but the current trend with LLMs is marked by exploitation.
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