The rise and fall of robots.txt
www.theverge.com
As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
  • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
    48·
    5 months ago

    Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don’t waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It’s there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.