replace the Web with slop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aji8lhaV3XM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260520-google-replacing-search-results-with-only-the-ai - podcast
time: 9 min 04 sec
replace the Web with slop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aji8lhaV3XM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260520-google-replacing-search-results-with-only-the-ai - podcast
time: 9 min 04 sec
If sites start blocking googlebot en masse, then googlebot will just start ignoring robots.txt
Can they just put an EULA on the site and then sue Google for unauthorized access?
Not in the US of course, but in the EU or something
Then you can just block the user agent in nginx or whatever you use, like all the other AI scrapers who ignore robots.txt (*cough* Amazon)
Then the user agent string will just quietly become randomised so you can’t match it reliably because it turns out that honouring robots.txt was always little more than a “gentleman’s handshake”.
this is a problem we have had for a while now, i assure you
Yeah an adversary like Google isn’t something you can easily block without really annoying legitimate users unfortunately. Nothing is stopping them from turning every chrome instance into a botnet node except for the angry article that would run in Ars Technica.