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Comment by Tharre | Hacker News Reader

Why would you voluntarily pretend to be a AI bot, when those have already a much higher chance of being blocked? Seems holly unproductive.

Best hypothesis I can come up with is to somehow make the AI companies look bad, but they seem to be doing an excellent job at that themselves already by scraping everyone hundreds of times per hour over and over.

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Because businesses dont want them blocked, that would be a very stupid thing for most of them to do given its becoming a vital traffic source now that people are using chatbots instead of google.

From what I have seen at work, everyone is using chat bots but no one is visiting websites through them. We still get almost all traffic through social media and google search.

the numbers are much smaller than traditional search but they are trending up, and they convert at almost 2x the rate of organic search inbounds. sure you can play catchup later, but the trend is quite clear. if there's one thing the last two years have taught me, my prior heuristics on now vs future don't work in 2026.

Yeah. Do you want the bot to buy the product from your website or your competitors?

How many from a direct link without a tracker? That’s usually how I use it for search, get the answer, find the sources and copy the link to a new tab

Most websites don't have an incentive to block AI bots to their main sites. Think businesses, government and community websites, nonprofits, etc.

Googlebot and other web scrapers are how you get visible, how you get adwords, ways to boost your traffic, etc.

bots hitting your site aren't problems per se

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