Now AI blocking will get you more precise control over your website! Now AI crawlers will be allowed to grab your website! But don’t worry! They promised and pinky swore they wouldn’t train any AI on your data. So your data is protected!
Isn’t that great!!?
You’re gonna hate when you find HOW they generated their search data for your searching.
I liked it. I regularly have lots of niche problems and back in the day I’d just put it into Google and find someone on Reddit or whatever who already tackled it 2 years ago. Now I don’t.
Also used to occasionally watch the web server logs and see how the search engines check for updates on the organization I’m volunteering at. Or index my employer’s website. Or the Fediverse apps I run. And tweak my visibility according to my liking. Now that changed quite dramatically as well.
Or archive some of the stuff online for people with an attention span > 30s. Nowadays that constitutes “suspicious activity”. While when I’m at the giving end, I get hammered by stupid AI crawlers. It’s a shame.
(But I found a very good solution to the Cloudflare issue, if you’re running web servers yourself: Don’t use Cloudflare. It’s as simple as that.)