I’d still like to see them provide better evidence for why we should feed their appetites for data though.
Search engine bots index our content, drive traffic to our sites, and help us reach our audience. But when it comes to the Ai platform bots, there’s been some discussion among expert website designers about whether these should be discouraged or blocked. Why is this question being asked?
Bots like Googlebot operate as an exchange: access to our content for free traffic. But Ai platform only bots such as GPTBot copy our data, train their models on it for unknown uses, and don’t really offer much in return (just a tiny amount of traffic at the moment). That’s probably not a compelling trade-off.
I think that in the creative industries, these concerns are well founded. However, in business sales, we do need to be included in whatever the Ai platforms are doing. If they’re undertaking research or making recommendations for their users, we want to be on those lists. I’d still like to see them provide better evidence for why we should feed their appetites for data though.