Comment by simonw
2 days ago
The big news here is that Googlebot will be blocked from September 15th onwards by one the "block training" policies, because Google use the same crawler infrastructure for their search index AND for training Gemini:
> Another change that will apply on September 15 is that multi-purpose crawlers (specifically those that combine Search with Training) will be allowed/blocked according to all of their behaviors, in line with our call for transparency for website owners. Since the defaults will be enforced by the most restrictive applicable rules, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training (either through the new options to manage AI traffic, or through the legacy Block AI bots service).
Good. Google's approach here is manifestly predator, unfair, and IMO illegal. They deserve to be in court for this behaviour, and mandating owners give consent for AI training or drop out of Google; which is just a non-starter because they're a search monopoly.
That's exactly what antitrust laws are supposed to do, and I hope at least EU regulators take action. Every single Googlebot crawl in your access logs is a trace for damages.
The irony here is that the people blocking all other crawlers are the ones shoring up their monopoly. If you can't block Googlebot because you need the search traffic but you block everybody else so that nobody other than Google can index your site, how do you expect to ever get any search traffic that isn't from Google?
Search traffic is nose diving due to LLM use. The fundamental calculus with google is you install GA and it helps your SEO has changed and google is riding out what will eventually wither as people start to reevaluate the trade off.
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I think it's bad, because everybody is desperate to hold onto every last bit of google search traffic they can, so they're going to allow training to do so. Google's predatory, unfair and illegal actions will continue as they have with a few $100 million slaps in the wrist from the EU and a few more white house dinners for their CEO.
I don't think it's the Google bot DDOSing people's infrastructure for AI training...
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Except that officially, that is not what they do? It's a dick move not to put the two usecases under separate user agents, but their documentation says you're free to block Google-Extended via robots.txt which is used for training and grounding, while still being included in the search index.
> Google-Extended does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
Exclusion from grounding does mean that your site won't get sourced in the AI overview, but I'm not sure what the click through rates are like on those.
AI crawlers, famous for respecting robots.txt ;)
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EU will write some strongly worded letter.
Saying this as a European who is pro EU.
Why should they?
This had me in disbelief since the minute I saw it: Google's "AI overview" presumably trained on content from other websites, disincentivizes users from clicking through to those websites..
How is that not conflict of interest??
> mandating owners give consent for AI training or drop out of Google
Huh?
Search and AI are hand-in-hand.
They both rely on embeddings. (Unless you still do keyword-only search, but that's not as good.)
How come you say "Good." and you are near the top of the comments but I say "Good." and get flagdead?
it’s likely to do with the fact that the parent comment here laid out a thoughtful basis / argument for their “good”, providing some detail to their justification for it.
that’s just my take/feedback, take it or leave it. i won’t be engaging further as i already feel i’m going against the site guidelines with this!
We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI training also. It's honestly kind of frustrating also because you then search on it and theres (was) nothing on how you are meant to "correctly" tell google to fuck off, and not use it like that.
The vast majority of Googlebot user agents are lying. Real Googlebot is pretty well behaved in my experience. You should use reverse DNS or IP lists to check: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
If you're using Cloudflare, set up a security rule to block requests that have "Googlebot" in the UA and are not recognised by CF as a real bot.
Google's web scraping functionality has been acting as a ddos for more than two decades. I've seen literally hundreds of reports of them attacking websites and taking them down, where there's nothing you can do but accept the traffic, or get delisted
This is unfortunately nothing new. There's no correct way to tell them to fuck off, they do not care, and they never will do. People have even taken them to court over this
If a site cannot handle traffic from the real Googlebot that is a serious issue with the site itself since it's actually pretty conservative
Also I should note there are lots of fake Googlebots...
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People will use something for search and something needs to index pages, either for LLM or old school search engine.
Don't that feel like a threat to businesses who dare to avoid their content being stolen?
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Why should I use something other than Cloudflare pages for a simple app landing page?
Because you value the internet being decentralised.
Because your viewer/customer base will be reduced.
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Why is this?
It's a planet-scale MITM?
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