Should you block AI bots from crawling your website?
You may have been scaremongered into thinking that AI crawlers are going to steal all your data and repurpose it without permission.
For many businesses, this may have been enough to convince them to block AI bots from crawling their site entirely.
In reality, bots like Googlebot have for years been crawling your website to understand the content being added, changed and removed from your site to aid search engines.
What are crawlers?
Crawlers are essentially tools, typically used by search engines like Google or Bing, to examine your website and index data from it, such as the content you’ve created and details about your company.
This ensures your website shows up accurately in search results. Crawlers are how search engines like Google discover and comprehend your site, so the concept of a crawler isn’t new.
AI crawlers employ the same technology, but instead of merely indexing your website data, AI crawlers scrutinize the information on your site and can use it to train their own technology Large Language Models, otherwise known as “LLMs,” such as ChatGPT.
The risks of allowing AI to crawl your website
When humans create content, we write with subtlety and there may be cultural or business context that makes what you write understandable to a specific audience.
When your content is taken out of that context and used to form part of an AI chatbot’s response, it will likely lose the subtlety, and the point your content made may have been lost or entirely misrepresented.
For some companies, this is a risk they don’t want to take, and so they block AI crawlers to prevent this. For instance, if you were a medical company with specific advice related to one of your products, you wouldn’t want an AI to take that out of context to an unrelated product or medical query.
Another risk to consider is unwanted association. As AI crawlers tend to take sections of information from various websites without always understanding the context of that piece of information.
The risk here is that your information may be presented alongside additional sources that your business doesn’t want to be associated with. If this is the case, then you may want to choose to block any AI crawler.
This will prevent your company from being mixed in with competitors, or those in your industry who may not uphold best practices. For some companies where reputation management is critical, this could be a very strong argument.
Is it worth blocking AI crawlers?
When considering whether to block ChatGPT and similar crawlers, there’s more to ponder over than the downsides alone.
In November 2023, ChatGPT hit 100 million users per week. With this figure likely to grow, that’s a great deal of brand visibility you’re missing out on if you refuse to embrace this technology.
LLMs are the future of search, that’s more than clear. Bing has already embraced AI in the form of Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google is hot on its heels, recently moving its own AI-powered search feature AI Overviews, previously called Search Generative Experience (SGE), into the main Google search results.
This means that if you’ve ever relied on organic search or SEO for a portion of your business generation, blocking AI could seriously hamper your efforts, if not now, then in the near future.
Granting access to your website content can assist in ensuring that your brand is accurately and favourably portrayed to ChatGPT users. Blocking it may actually have the opposite effect if you’re trying to avoid being misrepresented online.
We offer a free, no-commitment consultation at Nice Website where we can help you decide if your particular website should allow AI bots to cral your content.
Nice Website
is a website design studio based in Cork, Ireland. Our mission is to make great-looking, affordable, functional websites that engage visitors and bolster brands.