For decades, a humble text file governed the behavior of web scrapers. But as the AI industry grows, the social contract of robots.txt is falling apart.

AI is becoming increasingly unavoidable in websites and apps that you use. That’s why it feels so freeing on those rare ...

Google began testing AI Overviews as the " search generative experience " in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an ...

There are two problems with using requests for the robots.txt file to identify robotic traffic in your web log files. For one, the robots.txt request may not be the first request that you see from ...

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), commonly known as robots.txt, has been a web standard since 1994 and remains a key tool for website optimization today. This simple yet powerful file helps ...

Of course, not all Web bots are bad. Many have become crucial to the Internet. Search engines like Google build databases by sending bots to scour the World Wide Web - and captchas aren't designed ...

Several websites detail a man's murder, while others tell of robot insurrection. The matrix of online puzzles surrounding Steven Spielberg's is becoming a cult phenomenon of its own. By Robin Clewley.

Robots.txt just turned 30 – cue the existential crisis! Like many hitting the big 3-0, it’s wondering if it’s still relevant in today’s world of AI and advanced search algorithms. Spoiler ...

Yahoo has just unleashed a new site indexing robot to crawl the web with – Yahoo! ... In addition, its nice to see that the Slurp robot and search functions are all branded Yahoo.

A Little Bird search will also surface what people are reading and watching, who is the the most active on the social web, and who has the longest track record.