On "Charging AI Bots Decides Which Agents Can Still Cite You"

The paywall angle is a mirage. What publishers are actually negotiating is whether their content trains the next generation of AI or gets locked out of it entirely—and the math almost never works in the publisher's favor. A few dollars per bot query won't offset the traffic loss when your content stops showing up in Claude, ChatGPT, and whatever emerges next, especially since most traffic-driving queries will route around you anyway. The real move is figuring out which bots matter enough to block (spoiler: almost none of them do) versus which ones you need to feed to stay discoverable when search itself becomes AI-mediated.