Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.
  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    I don’t; I think googlebot is paying attention to it, and AI sites get a LOT of their initial visibility and site ranking from the Google index.

    Case in point: the sites I spend time on that set robots.txt to deny all bots before the LLM wave started still aren’t getting hammered with AI bot requests, while the ones that didn’t are.

    I can see it on my own websites as well; I’ve got one that’s in Google’s index, and it gets a constant low volume traffic from AI bots. The ones that aren’t listed? They just get traffic from exploit scanners.