- AI and Google scrapers are aggressively stealing copyrighted content, degrading website performance and prompting the use of captchas.
- Cloudflare is defaulting new and free-tier sites to block multipurpose crawlers (like Google's) from pages with ads, aiming to protect content.
- Publishers, including USA Today Inc., consider delisting from Google due to lack of licensing deals and declining search traffic.
- AI scrapers should pay significant fees for content use, as seen in a class action settlement where the author received $3,000 from Anthropic.