What did he think a crawler is? Why was he surprised that not allowing companies to use his data lead to them not using his data? Looks like he has another surprise coming when he notices that search engines no longer index his blog.
I feel like most casual users would not make the connection of “crawlers” to link previews that they talk about it the article.
Sure, if you understand that robots.txt includes all robots then sure. But that is not how general news media has been talking about robots.txt.
that is not how general news media has been talking about robots.txt.
Ahh, yes. I think there is a lesson there.
So. If I can add something here for everyone’s benefit
No search engine really obeys robots.txt
Their publicly acknowledged crawlers do, but they have other crawlers that aren’t know that ignore the file.
Google knows every inch of your site, allowed or not.
See, just because a search engine says it doesn’t know, doesn’t mean it hasn’t crawled. Just doesn’t display the results based on your settings.
And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/
Huh. So in this case, the file actually is respected. Refreshing
Kinda, but also not really. Any major tech player that has billions to lose will make a show of respecting robots.txt when presenting that information to third parties, lest they be exposed by basic journalism.
However, they also have separate networks in R&D that sweep the net all the time and do not care about such restrictions. It’s theatre.
And they’re still happy to punish people that have the gall to publicly decline their crawlers. Basically they can eat their cake and have it too.
Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.
For example, Googlebot if enabled won’t just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google’s AI. Edit: see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ as source. I imagine LinkedinBot, given it’s microsoft, will feed some other AI of theirs as well on top of the previews.
Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn’t going to improve.
Googlebot if enabled won’t just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google’s AI.
False.
See here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ If you have a source that says it’s false, I’d be curious.
Ok. That quotes a tweet by Cloudflare’s CEO. IDK what his qualifications are, but his conflict of interest is obvious enough. Real quality journalism there.
ETA: I looked at what the Cloudflare CEO said again. To be fair to him, he is not actually claiming that Googlebot collects AI training data. He’s talking about the AI overview, which is a search feature. The data for search features is collected by Googlebot. I’m not sure why someone would want their link listed in search but not appear much more prominently in the AI overview.
Here’s Google technical documentation on its crawlers: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
So what’s the quote from the documentation that backs up your claim? The line “perform other product specific crawls” seems extremely vague by design.
I’m not really sure what you are asking here. Did you notice that you can scroll down and see a list of their crawlers?
Nothing on this page seems to contradict the article. But if I simply missed the part that does, I’d be happy to learn.
Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.
This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.
That’s very different from what I called false.
What you describe may happen, but probably not as much as you think. Much of that stuff is just not that valuable. Some personal, colloquial writing is necessary, but Google already pays Reddit. Other stuff is better obtained from torrents or shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive.
