I manage many sites — some are tools, some are blogs like this one. I started them more than 20 years ago, first for myself, then to share with others. Along the way you learn about SEO, bots, Google crawlers. I even designed a few web crawlers myself, for backup and research purposes.
Then, in the last few years, a new kind of traffic emerged: AI bots.
AI bots crawl or pinpoint specific pages to read, copy, and analyze content — but to what end? Some AI systems crawl for knowledge and ranking. Others use what they find to replicate and reproduce the work they discover. Some scan for vulnerabilities or attempt to access parts of websites they have no business touching.
Which raises a question: what is the ratio of human to non-human traffic on the internet today? Who is actually creating the pages, images, and stories? Are we heading toward bots building the internet for other bots?
There’s another troubling side to AI-generated content: it distorts things. Facts, appearances, context — these get altered, and those alterations persist. Other bots read those errors and generate new ones, compounding inaccuracies in a cycle that only gets worse over time.
This is what’s pushing me toward blocking AI on some of my sites. A small step for one person — but small steps, taken by enough people, still add up to something better.
