I’ve been meaning to get around to this for a while but based on Robb Knight’s many blog posts on how bad AI companies are treating the web I finally added a block to all AI bots to my site at the server level.

What galls me most about this is that AI companies keep cropping up, including Apple, and after they’ve scrapped writers content they go live and tell us how to block their bots. But the damage is done for the most part, you’ve already been scrapped.

It feels like a criminal stealing your stuff and then advising you on the best lock to use to keep them out next time. Your stuff is still gone, they’re still selling your stuff to make money, but next time they won’t steal your stuff.

We of course must now trust them to not change their crawler names and if they do let us know before they steal our content the next time. I believe that AI companies should have to ask for permission instead of every user having to tell them no.

I got my list of bots to block from here which Robb Knight linked to.

Oh and the majority of CloudFlare’s customers don’t want AI on their sites either.