AI Crawlers Threaten Web Quality as Traffic and Trust Collapse

For many years, search engines visited websites and sent people back to read the original information.

AI tools now often read websites and give people answers without making them visit those sites.

This can reduce website traffic and advertising income.

Some website owners are therefore blocking AI crawlers.

However, websites with incorrect information may be less likely to block them.

This could cause AI answers to rely more on poor-quality or AI-written material.

Training AI on too much AI-written material may also make its answers worse, a problem called model collapse.

The article suggests clicking original search results and trying search engines that use less AI.