The question of whether to block or allow AI bots has become the single most critical decision for SEO professionals and brand managers in 2024. As AI reshapes how information is discovered, the traditional exchange of “content for traffic” is breaking down.
With companies like Amazon taking aggressive legal stances against certain crawlers, the industry is split. Should you protect your data from being scraped, or does blocking these bots condemn your brand to obscurity in the age of AI search?
Navigating the Complex Landscape of AI Crawlers
The instinct to lock down content is understandable, but it fails to account for the nuance of how modern bots operate.
As Parth notes, blocking every bot is like locking your apartment gate against everyone, including the food delivery driver you ordered from.
Understanding the Different Types of Bots
Not all AI bots serve the same purpose. There is a distinct difference between bots that scrape data solely to train models and “search bots” that fetch real-time information to answer user queries.
Parth explains that while a training bot scrapes data for its internal model, an OpenAI search bot actually helps your pages appear inside AI search answers. Blocking the former protects your IP, but blocking the latter might erase your visibility in the new search landscape.
The Visibility vs. Control Debate
Vijay shares a compelling counterpoint: for many clients, the joy of appearing in a ChatGPT response is now equal to ranking in the top three of Google. He argues that since most content is already optimized for visibility, allowing bots like GPTBot is worth the risk to ensure the brand remains visible in this new wave of search.
However, this comes with technical overhead. Vijay’s log analysis revealed that GPTBot was crawling his robots.txt file up to 1,000 times a day, behaving significantly more aggressively than traditional crawlers.
The Shift Towards Agentic AI
We are moving beyond simple search; we are entering the era of “agentic AI” where bots perform actions on behalf of users.
Gagan highlights how browsers like Comet are using agents to bypass traditional interfaces, allowing users to search and shop on sites like Amazon without engaging with the site’s native ads.
This capability is why Amazon has sent legal notifications to companies like Perplexity, fearing a loss of ad revenue and user behavior data.
E-commerce and the Fear of Traffic Loss
For e-commerce giants, the threat is existential. If an AI agent can complete a purchase for a user, the marketplace loses the opportunity to cross-sell or serve ads.
Despite this fear, Gagan warns that blocking these bots could be a strategic error. If you do not allow AI companies to train on your content now, your brand will be absent from the applications and APIs built on those models for years to come.
Future-Proofing with Updated Protocols
The industry is racing to solve this with better standards than the binary “allow or disallow” of robots.txt.
Gagan points out that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on new protocols to give site owners granular control over AI interactions.
In the near future, you may be able to specify that Google can use your content for AI Overviews but not for training Gemini, creating a more balanced “social contract” for the web.
Your thoughts?
Catch the Recap of Ep.121 of SEOTalk Spaces here: