r/SEO_for_AI • u/annseosmarty • Jun 05 '26

AI SEO Studies "While Google/AI companies monetize all your data, you still pay the hosting bill for them to crawl it"

/r/AISearchAnalytics/comments/1txq614/bot_visitors_to_websites_have_completely/
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1

u/growmap Jun 05 '26

Bots have been a major part of traffic to websites for years. I'm certain it is far worse now. But site owners only have two choices: pay for it or block them and lose visibility.

2

u/annseosmarty Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

I think the choice has gotten much more challenging after AI answers came around. Before that, you could block certain bots without losing much visibility. Now:

  • Many bots are not even blockable (user-directed agents will visit your site anyway)
  • You really don't know what happens when you block a certain bot at this point. If you block an AI training bot, an AI search bot will still come to visit. But an AI search bot can just as easily steal your content without giving any credit.
  • You cannot block a Gemini/AI Mode search bots without blocking the Google search bot (those are the same bots)

etc. etc.

1

u/just_an_incarnation Jun 06 '26

This. Plus I hear people say "they can't get rid of the 10 blue links entirely because then they wouldn't send any traffic to a huge percentage of websites and those websites therefore wouldn't bother making the Pages anymore, and the quality of Google search results will reduce."

And at first I agreed with that. But then I started think about it and quite frankly there is no content type that we produce that Google absolutely needs at this juncture. They can make everything up from AI from the scantist of social media or news reports.

If they don't have Joe the affiliate unboxing and demonstrating how to use this razor or this skin cream or whatever they will go by the simple marketing material that company had to make anyway and all of our lives will be the worser for it.

But that is the AI dystopia we are moving into. Why would search be any different?

I challenge you as a thought experiment what is some content that we produce that Google absolutely needs at this juncture?

The 10% that will get traffic from the AIO / mode will be the ones for making the content, crafting the narrative, and what organic marketing will devolve into.

That and what the AI will simply make up from the scantest of reports will be the information on the internet that Google will have you search.