Source: Search Engine Journal
Publishers are increasingly restricting AI crawler access to their sites, but they're doing so based on traffic metrics with unclear denominators—meaning nobody knows what portion of their referrals are being excluded or preserved. The same blocking decisions generate wildly different conclusions about business impact depending on whose measurement methodology you trust, effectively allowing publishers to choose their own narrative around AI's value to their bottom line. The web's attribution infrastructure is fragmented enough that "protecting traffic" can mean almost anything.