[dannyw]

Good. Google's approach here is manifestly predator, unfair, and IMO illegal. They deserve to be in court for this behaviour, and mandating owners give consent for AI training or drop out of Google; which is just a non-starter because they're a search monopoly.

That's exactly what antitrust laws are supposed to do, and I hope at least EU regulators take action. Every single Googlebot crawl in your access logs is a trace for damages.

[AnthonyMouse]

The irony here is that the people blocking all other crawlers are the ones shoring up their monopoly. If you can't block Googlebot because you need the search traffic but you block everybody else so that nobody other than Google can index your site, how do you expect to ever get any search traffic that isn't from Google?

[tempest_]

Search traffic is nose diving due to LLM use. The fundamental calculus with google is you install GA and it helps your SEO has changed and google is riding out what will eventually wither as people start to reevaluate the trade off.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's nose diving due to Google putting the LLM answer box at the top of the search results. But then isn't it even worse to be blocking every search engine crawler that isn't doing that?

[dannyw]

Even companies like OpenAI segregate their training crawlers (GPTBot for general corpus training; OAI-SearchBot for their search index inclusion; and ChatGPT-User for user-driven agentic browser use, etc).

When even OpenAI is more respectful of intellectual property and website owner control than you, that's a problme.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Even companies like OpenAI segregate their training crawlers (GPTBot for general corpus training; OAI-SearchBot for their search index inclusion; and ChatGPT-User for user-driven agentic browser use, etc).

They have three different user agent strings, anyway. The problem is obviously that you can't tell what someone does with data after you give it to them.

You also don't know that some third party isn't crawling the web with the user agent string "OAI-SearchBot" and then using the results for training or selling the data to the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI without telling them that.

In general attempting to use the user agent string for access control is not going to work and it seems like Google is being the less disingenuous party on this one by not blowing smoke.

[xnx]

How does Google Analytics "help your SEO"?

[troyvit]

I think it's bad, because everybody is desperate to hold onto every last bit of google search traffic they can, so they're going to allow training to do so. Google's predatory, unfair and illegal actions will continue as they have with a few $100 million slaps in the wrist from the EU and a few more white house dinners for their CEO.

[PunchyHamster]

I don't think it's the Google bot DDOSing people's infrastructure for AI training...

[Scroll_Swe]

EU will write some strongly worded letter.

Saying this as a European who is pro EU.

Why should they?

[Razengan]

This had me in disbelief since the minute I saw it: Google's "AI overview" presumably trained on content from other websites, disincentivizes users from clicking through to those websites..

How is that not conflict of interest??

[Deathmax]

Except that officially, that is not what they do? It's a dick move not to put the two usecases under separate user agents, but their documentation says you're free to block Google-Extended via robots.txt which is used for training and grounding, while still being included in the search index.

> Google-Extended does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

Exclusion from grounding does mean that your site won't get sourced in the AI overview, but I'm not sure what the click through rates are like on those.

[mysterydip]

AI crawlers, famous for respecting robots.txt ;)

[dannyw]

The western AI crawlers are generally very-well behaved. GPTBot and ClaudeBot are nice crawlers and I see them respecting my robots.txt.

There are of course plenty of mystery, obfuscated/camouflaged scrapers/crawlers from god knows whom. Thankfully they are easy to spot and ban, although I've definitely thought about deliberating sending them poisoned data.

[paulddraper]

> mandating owners give consent for AI training or drop out of Google

Huh?

Search and AI are hand-in-hand.

They both rely on embeddings. (Unless you still do keyword-only search, but that's not as good.)

[inigyou]

How come you say "Good." and you are near the top of the comments but I say "Good." and get flagdead?

[dijksterhuis]

it’s likely to do with the fact that the parent comment here laid out a thoughtful basis / argument for their “good”, providing some detail to their justification for it.

that’s just my take/feedback, take it or leave it. i won’t be engaging further as i already feel i’m going against the site guidelines with this!