AI crawlers, web scraping, and protecting your website content from unauthorised automated data collection.
AI crawlers are hammering websites at scale, scraping content to train language models. Some respect robots.txt. Many don't. The bandwidth costs alone can be a problem, and that's before you consider the intellectual property implications of your content appearing in AI outputs.
These articles cover the technical and legal sides of content scraping: identifying AI crawlers in your logs, blocking them effectively, understanding which controls actually work, and following the policy debates that will shape how web scraping is regulated going forward.
A 180-page Lords report warns that AI companies are scraping UK website content without permission, payment, or disclosure. The committee wants licensing, not opt-out. Here's what it means for the 5.5 million UK businesses publishing content online, and five steps you can take before the law catches up.
