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AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

But the cure may ruin the web.... Opinion With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills.
Android

Meta's new crawler could scrape your page, even when you don't want it to

Meta has emerged from the Metaverse to become a major player on the AI court. As such, the company has its own team of web crawlers that scrape pages that don’t have the Robots.txt protocol. Or, at ...
Morning Overview on MSN

The biggest sites on the web are now slamming their doors on AI crawlers — charging millions for the data that has quietly been training the world’s chatbots

On July 1, 2025, Cloudflare flipped a switch that changed the default relationship between websites and the AI companies that ...
PC World

How to protect your website from Open AI’s ChatGPT web crawlers

Since summer 2023, you can prevent the crawlers from the AI company Open AI from reading your website and making it part of the artificial intelligence ChatGPT, which can be found at ...
Inc

Why Anthropic’s Web Crawlers Have Been ‘Hammering’ Websites

Entrepreneurs are reporting disruptive levels of traffic from the AI company–but there’s an easy way to prevent it. To train and improve models, AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI make use of bots ...
UPI

Cloudflare to block AI crawler bots by default

July 1 (UPI) --Cloudflare announced it will begin blocking AI web crawlers to prevent them from "accessing content without permission or compensation," from all of its clients beginning on Tuesday.
Searchenginejournal.com

Google’s Web Crawler Fakes Being “Idle” To Render JavaScript

Google's web crawler simulates "idle" states to trigger JavaScript events. This change improves the rendering of pages that use idle callbacks. Developers should ...
MacStories

How We’re Trying to Protect MacStories from AI Bots and Web Crawlers – And How You Can, Too

Over the past several days, we’ve made some changes at MacStories to address the ingestion of our work by web crawlers operated by artificial intelligence companies. We’ve learned a lot, so we thought ...
Computerworld

AI crawlers vs. web defenses: Cloudflare-Perplexity fight reveals cracks in internet trust

The feud underscores the need for new standards in AI-web interaction, as bot detection tools struggle to distinguish between helpful assistants and harmful scrapers. A public war of words has erupted ...
MacStories

Wired Confirms Perplexity Is Bypassing Efforts by Websites to Block Its Web Crawler

Last week, Federico and I asked Robb Knight to do what he could to block web crawlers deployed by artificial intelligence companies from scraping MacStories. Robb had already updated his own site’s ...
Search Engine Roundtable

Google On Good Web Crawler Attributes

Myriam Jessier asked Google about what would be good attributes of a web crawler. In which both Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes gave some responses to. Myriam Jessier asked on Bluesky, "what are the ...