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Categories
Tag Archives: AI scraping
Why is This Strange AI Prompt Showing Up in My Google Search Console?
If you opened your Google Search Console (GSC) performance report recently, like one of our “Ask David!” submitters did, you might have noticed a sudden, bizarre spike in impressions for an exact query string that looks something like this:
visit the website at [[website]] and extract the company's brand name as it appears on-site. normali
Seeing a massive, raw instruction template ending in a broken word like "normali" can immediately trigger alarm bells. Did my site get hacked? Is my
... Continue readingThe AI Scraping Free-for-All Is Over: Welcome to the Era of Licensing (2026)
Quick Summary: The 2026 AI Licensing Blueprint
🚨 The Crisis: AI "Zero-Click" answers are draining traffic.
🎯 The Goal: Protect your data from "Training" bots while staying visible to "Search" bots.
🛡️ The Defense: Layer Cloudflare over your UltimateWB site to block "stealth" scrapers at the edge.
💰 The Payday: Use RSL 1.0 and TollBit to turn your content into a licensed asset.
🛑 Bottom Line: Stop being the "raw material" for AI for free. Lock the door and set
Posted in AI, Technology in the News
Tagged .htaccess, AI bots, AI crawlers, AI scraping, AI Tollbooths, ai training, AI user agents, apache, Appen, Axel Springer, bandwidth, bots, Business Insider, cdn, chatgpt, Cloudflare, Cloudflare Pay-Per-Crawl, community website, Condé Nast, content delivery network, cpu, crawl, Defined.ai, engagement, Google AI, google ai overviews, Google AI snippets, indexing, lawsuits, legal compliance, license.xml, licensing, litigation, llm, meta, News Corp, No-AI meta tags, OpenAI, pay-per-crawl, perplexity, Politico, RAG, Really Simple Licensing, reddit, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, robots.txt, RSL, search engine optimization, search engine traffic, seo, seo ranking, seo rankings, server-level rules, social website, stack overflow, stealth bots, TollBit, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Wired, xai
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The $10 Billion “Echo”: Why Paying Experts to Train AI Might Be a Bridge to Nowhere
There’s a new giant in Silicon Valley called Mercor. Valued at a staggering $10 billion (a massive jump from its $2 billion valuation just months ago), their business model is simple: they pay doctors, lawyers, and engineers to sit down and teach AI how to do their jobs. By early 2026, the company is reportedly paying out over $1.5 million daily to a network of 30,000+ experts.
On the surface, it might look like a savvy way for tech
... Continue reading
Posted in AI, Technology in the News
Tagged ai, AI scraping, content scraping, entry-level jobs, Google AI, google ai overviews, Mercor, pizza glue, scraping, silicon valley, start-up, teach ai
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AI Gone Rogue Again? Perplexity Bots Bypass IP Blocks and Robots.txt
Just months after Claude’s so-called “blackmail” stunt fueled fears about agentic AI models, the web is facing another wave of rogue behavior. This time, Perplexity AI is under fire for sneaking past website blocks, disguising its bots, and scraping content without permission. While Claude sparked debates about AI ethics and control, Perplexity highlights a more widespread, everyday threat to publishers: unconsented content harvesting at massive scale.
Ignoring Robots.txt
Cloudflare, which recently expanded into bot management, reported that Perplexity’s crawlers often
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