The Growing Backlash Against AI Scraping

A recent study highlights a measurable backlash from website owners against AI scraping technologies. The Data Provenance Initiative analyzed over 14,000 websites and found that around 5% had updated their robots.txt files to block AI scrapers, a notable increase from zero just a year prior. Among the most actively maintained websites, the blocking rate reached 28%, indicating significant concern over the unauthorized use of their content. This trend suggests that website owners are becoming increasingly proactive in safeguarding their intellectual property from AI companies that scrape their data.