How does GenAI bot activity affect post source?

Sending on behalf of Chris:

“I took notice of this post on LinkedIn, which brings attention to the impact of bot activity on websites.
Seems this activity can impose quite a range of disruption to a website.
Wondering how this bot activity affects post source remediation efforts.”


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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7348784412014047232-uSM2/

https://www.techpolicy.press/cloudflare-wades-into-the-battle-over-ai-consent-and-compensation/

Cloudflare Wades into the Battle Over AI Consent and Compensation

Excerpt:
Spoiler alert: referral traffic has plummeted<https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/22/ai_search_starves_publishers/> dramatically, and few think that it is ever coming back as generative AI summaries and chatbots become the new interfaces for searching for information and interacting online. The collapse of referral traffic and audience reach will impact not just digital advertising revenue but also conversion rates. I’ve heard from countless publishers and collective management organizations (which represent rights holders) that referral traffic is down significantly, while bot traffic is up.

Cloudflare’s data<https://blog.cloudflare.com/control-content-use-for-ai-training/> paints a stark picture of how AI crawlers operate at indefensibly extractive levels: OpenAI’s scraping-to-referral ratio is 1,700:1 and Anthropic is at 73,000:1. Traditional search engines—particularly the market-dominant Google—till drive traffic, but increasingly, initial answers come from AI models that summarize content without redirecting traffic. Google’s crawler now scrapes around 14 pages per referral, down from 6 to 1 six months ago (and 2 to 1<https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/22/ai_search_starves_publishers/> ten years ago) even as its total search impressions increased nearly 50 percent<https://www.brightedge.com/news/press-releases/one-year-google-ai-overviews-brightedge-data-reveals-google-search-usage> a year after it launched Google AI Overview (and as it was judged to be liable for having an illegal monopoly in search).

These figures crystallize what publishers and creatives have long argued: AI development is built atop uncompensated creative labor and poses an existential<https://www.techpolicy.press/the-ai-act-and-the-existential-risk-facing-journalism/> threat to those who provide the content that makes the Internet such a valuable public resource.