I've been wondering why website owners choose to block AI bots from accessing their sites. I typically use a VPS with caching that can handle a good amount of traffic without incurring extra costs, and I haven't had to deal with AI bots before. It seems to me that if AI bots crawl your site, they could recommend it to users of their models, which could lead to more traffic and visibility for us. Am I missing something about the downsides of allowing this?
4 Answers
If your website's main value is its content, then AI bots can actually take your content and serve it to users without sending them to your site. This means you lose out on traffic and potentially ad revenue. Blocking them can protect your content and keep your audience engaged directly on your platform.
Letting AI bots crawl your site can provide exposure, but it comes with risks. Many block them to save on server costs and to maintain control over their content. Bots can pull a lot from your site without giving anything back. It's a tough call on whether the potential visibility is worth the risks associated.
While it's true that AI bots might bring some visibility, most of the time they just create additional server load without guaranteeing traffic back to your site. Many choose to block them because they can be resource-heavy, and they sometimes scrape content without giving credit, which can hurt your site's reputation.
I've had my share of issues with aggressive bots. I used to have my AWS bill spike because of constant crawling, so I've used filtering tools to manage traffic. Some site owners block all bots for control and performance reasons. If bots are well-behaved, they can stay. Otherwise, it's all about balancing exposure with bandwidth.
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