Chatbot uses search then

[mattlinares]

What are peoples thoughts about services like ChatGPT using Google search instead of crawling a site directly and then inspecting the URLs to regurgitate the material. It's helpful, but it also almost does the same thing as if it had scraped the site. Clearly this is different to an LLM scraping all data for training, but it is an interesting workaround that in at least one use case achieves the same effect, by relying on the work of another crawler i.e. Google's.

Here is what ChatGPT said:

[glyn]

Interesting! If I understand correctly, the article content is not used to train ChatGPT's model, so I'm less concerned than if it was. On the other hand, this effectively makes some search bots AI-related, and we might therefore be inclined to ban them.

I think search engines are still useful and I'd personally want my site to be indexed by them, at least while it's possible to use search engines and opt out of AI summaries etc.

On balance, I don't think we should ban search bots. But I dare say others will think differently...