The bots already won the front door

Publishers will never stop all the scrapers. The fight worth having is over what AI does with the content once it has it.

[Source images: Adobe Stock]

Pete Pachal is a journalist and the creator of Media Copilot, a newsletter and podcast that examines how AI is changing media, journalism, and the news.

The bots are winning.

That’s my clearest takeaway after reading the first section of the latest State of the Bots report from TollBit, which builds payment rails between publishers and AI crawlers. In it, People Inc.’s Chief Innovation Officer, Jonathan Roberts, outlines the company’s approach to AI bots scraping content from its many media properties: aggressively block unauthorized bots while allowing access to legitimate crawlers, which typically means........

© Fast Company