Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Conversation
The Conversation
Dana McKay, Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information, RMIT University

AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find

Damien Geso / Getty Images

For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content you give credit by linking to the source.

Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate).

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.