AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find

Damien Geso / Getty Images For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content you give credit by linking to the source. Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate). When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or…