Source: Search Engine Journal
Website owners face a genuine infrastructure problem as AI scraping bots consume disproportionate bandwidth for model training, forcing decisions about whether to block them or absorb the costs. The tension isn't theoretical—it's about who bears the expense of AI development. Site owners are caught between protecting margins and maintaining search engine visibility that depends on robots.txt compliance. This creates openings for intermediary solutions like rate-limiting services and bot detection tools, and pressure on AI companies to negotiate fair-use arrangements rather than assume infinite free access to crawl the web.