I thought I'd add some questions to hopefully kick things along a bit. After all the AI evolution is going to become an expediential evolution and we need to grow with it to be ahead of the game.

1. Blocking ChatGPT: Are we protecting our content or missing out on free exposure?
2. If ChatGPT can summarize your site, do you even need Google?
3. Will ChatGPT cannibalize website traffic, or is it a new marketing tool?
4. Blocking ChatGPT may save your server—but at what SEO cost?
5. Is attribution from AI-generated answers just a pipe dream?
6. Should smaller sites embrace ChatGPT while big brands block it?
7. Is AI crawling the end of traditional SEO?
8. ChatGPT: The silent traffic thief or a boon for brand visibility?
9. By blocking ChatGPT, are we fighting AI evolution or protecting IP?
10. Are attribution links from AI answers enough to justify the risk?

The only thing "free" in this equation is YOUR CONTENT. We have lasting experience with how that "free" stuff works all these years later with g ... you can't expect that anything has changed just because it is called "AI".

I've been blocking the ai bots from the beginning ... that is the beginning of what I THINK was the beginning. More than likely it all started a lot earlier, under the radar, and the cat is out of the bag for sites like mine that are legacy and evergreen. Get it once and you got the best of it already. New things added are blocked, but that's like closing the barn door after all the animals have escaped.

YMMV

A reminder:

TANSTAAFL!

Look it up if you don't know what it means. True then, true now.

TANSTAAFL indeed LOL ..
But who is hoping for it, AI that want to scrape / index for free, or site owners who hope for free traffic?

The main thing to consider is whether there is any benefit to being crawled: We originally let the search engines crawl because it sent us traffic. That seems to be less and less these days, and a key question is what traffic are you getting from ChatGPT?
What experiments have you undertaken?

I haven't done any focussed experiments with AI and content. I did interrogate ChatGPT in quite a lot of detail on various issues to try and see if it would stay honest. It never once referred to a source.

That study is so biased. Nobody searches for "article attribution" - that's not how an AI LLM works. Only people looking to point fingers at something runs a "study" that way. It is a game of gotcha. It reads like the study summary was written before the study was done. They went looking for results and poked around until they could get the LLM to generate it.

Here's another fun game: got to SearchGPT and search on your domain name. A high percentage of the time, your site will not come up if it is not a top 500 site. Gotcha OpenAI. lol

WebmasterWorld has been getting a trickle of referrals from SearchGPT for about the last two months. (blush - it is where I found this thread). It is hard to detect though because SearchGPT is under a layer of JavaScript obfuscation that blocks referral passing.

> 1. Blocking ChatGPT: Are we protecting our content or missing out on free exposure?

missing exposure and branding.

> 2. If ChatGPT can summarize your site, do you even need Google?

Those two actions are not necc related. I don't want a webpage summary. Not something I use.

> do you even need Google?

No. I rarely use Bing or Google any more. (google for maps and youtube and Bing for images is about it), I am 100% a SearchGPT user all the time now.

> 3. Will ChatGPT cannibalize website traffic, or is it a new marketing tool?

Not an either or question. It is a yes to both.

> 4. Blocking ChatGPT may save your server but at what SEO cost?

If an OpenAI bot once a month will crash your server - you need a new server.
You get more traffic in snoop bots than OpenAI causes load.

> 5. Is attribution from AI-generated answers just a pipe dream?

No - attribution is not necessary requirement because most of the responses are generated by thousands of data points.
The responses are synthesized.

Yes, links are certainly part of the equation.

> 6. Should smaller sites embrace ChatGPT while big brands block it?

Now we are on the same page ;-)

> 7. Is AI crawling the end of traditional SEO?

No Google's monopoly was...

> 8. ChatGPT: The silent traffic thief or a boon for brand visibility?

Great brand visibility. 200million users. Dats alot of eyeballs.

> 9. By blocking ChatGPT, are we fighting AI evolution or protecting IP?

There is zero harm in letting OpenAI at your content.

> 10. Are attribution links from AI answers enough to justify the risk?

What risk? Of gaining some traffic?

The nuances are many with AI because all the major engines (Bing, Google, Perplexity, SearchGPT) are showing the responses differently.

more of my thoughts on OpenAI and SearchGPT:
[searchengineworld.com...]

I see no reason to block ChatGPT excepting if you are a very important brand, like the NY Times, or sites like that, or if it's slowing down your site too much.

If you block ChatGPT, they'll find the information elsewhere anyhow, also, I doubt that ChatGPT is using single source of information in its answers.

If you really have a unique content, and block ChatGPT, then what? ChatGPT might not be able to answer a request, but that is not going to drive traffic to your site anyhow.

Now, things to consider. ChatGPT is not quoting sources, but, Co-pilot does, and it uses ChatGPT. Also, in the future it's possible (or not) that ChatGPT starts quoting sources, or making reference to web sites from where it get the information. I think this is going to happen, because, at some point ChatGPT will need to prove the claim of its answers to make them legitimate and this can also be used as a disclaimer in case of wrong information, to say, look, I found it here.

Also, we don't know, but Bing might be using ChatGPT in a way or another to evaluate a web site, so it can have an impact on the ranking one day (or not).

So, I think there is no reason to block ChatGPT. At worse it won't bring more traffic, but there is still a possibility it does at some point, or in some way.

or site owners who hope for free traffic?

Blood, sweat and tears to make the content, costs for servers, bandwidth, DNS registrations, Domain Names, salaries (if site large enough), access ... NOTHING IS FREE. You are paying for it every day you are connected (who is paying that bill?).

That said, AI results are homogenized from dozens, perhaps hundreds of samples, with no clear attribution to source. That's zero traffic in return for scraping your content and burning bandwidth--both of which "you" continue to finance out of your pocket.

Early days g let the myth of great traffic and fast money proliferate---until it was time to turn the screws. Why would any one think that CHAT AI, etc will be any different? G has already set the precedent of promising a lot and delivering little, after everyone is "hooked".

Now, having posted what might appear to be a negative screed, I do find the chat ai stuff KINDA useful. Can't trust it yet, but it does aid in the "hadn't thought of that aspect" kind of research. Getting closer to computer use ala Star Trek and that's kind of exciting.

But it ain't free and, unlike g's search, does not yet appear to drive traffic to sources (websites) and probably ignores anyone with an ecommerce site which is nothing more than a distribution point for manufactured goods available any where.

Try it some time Tangor. Lots of links and attribution in ChatGPT's new search engine mode:
link [webmasterworld.com]

See above. I did. It is not consistent. You still can't trust it. Then again you can't trust anything on the internet anyway. ;)

Then again you can't trust anything on the internet anyway. ;)

cough :) now don't play with my sense of reality. Fake news, marketing BS, illusions; it's out of control. As we say in Australia "it's on for young and old" [idioms.thefreedictionary.com...]

Jokes aside, we're moving to another level here, and in chaos there's opportunity.