Bots drive content access and monetization, while content owners seek revenue. IAB Tech Lab released draft guidance for bot management strategies and opened public comment until June 26 to gather feedback and questions. Blocking crawlers entirely is described as ineffective because it blocks useful verification bots such as ads.txt crawlers. Indiscriminate blocking can reduce programmatic demand when supply chains cannot be validated. The core issue is not crawling itself, but limited understanding of the costs to deliver content to bots and how content is accessed, interpreted, or used. The guidance aims to align bot access practices across publishers with differing views on how content should be available to bots.
"The bots are hungry for content. The content owners are hungry for monetization. And the IAB Tech Lab is working on new recommendations that will - hopefully - help everyone get fed. On Wednesday, the Tech Lab released its guidance for bot management strategies, which is open for public comment until June 26. The purpose of the public comment period is to invite content owners to provide feedback and ask questions so that the final document can be as helpful as possible."
"Because right now, everyone's strategy looks a little bit different - and a lot of them aren't as fruitful as they might sound. For example, blocking crawlers entirely isn't an effective strategy, said Hillary Slattery, the Tech Lab's senior director of project management for programmatic, since doing so blocks everything, including useful bots like ads.txt crawlers that verify which companies are authorized to sell inventory. Content owners (and this means anyone who owns content on the web, not just publishers, Slattery emphasized) that block indiscriminately eventually see their programmatic demand disappear "because their supply chains couldn't be validated," she said."
"The problem with bot traffic "is not the existence of crawling," according to the draft guidelines. Rather, the problem is that many content owners have "little to no understanding" of how much it costs to deliver their content to bots, nor how the content is being "accessed, interpreted or used.""
"Slattery joked that her nickname for the Content Monetization Protocols Working Group, which is the body that devised the draft guidelines, is "crawl me maybe," since every online publisher seems to have a different perspective on how their content should or shouldn't be accessible to bots. The new document provides ways for c"
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