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How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

teruza.com

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#31

In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (lik…

Publishing does not and should not mean you give away all your rights.

Part of the reason for writing is to cultivate an audience, to bring like-minded people together.

Letting a middleman wedge itself between you and your reader damages the ability and does NOT benefit the writer. If the writer wanted an LLM summary, they always have the option to generate it themselves. But y'know what? Most writers don't. Because they don't want LLM summaries.

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Also, LLMs have been known to introduce biases into their output. Just yesterday somebody said they used an LLM for translation and it silently removed entire paragraphs because they triggered some filters. I for one don't want a machine which pretends to be impartial to pretend to "summarize" my opinions when in fact it's presenting a weaker version.

The best way to discredit an idea is not to argue against it, but to argue for it poorly.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#32

I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…

[deleted]

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#33

I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…

I have recently found out that the snapshots have a "why?" field. The archivers might not be internet archive themselves, but commoncrawl, archive team, etc. pushing your site to Internet Archive. Look at the reason, and get mad to the correct people. It might be the archive themselves, but just be sure.

Thanks - wasn't aware. (why: certificate-transparency, open-research-datasets, webwidecrawl)

I still don't fathom why they just _ignore_ the request not to be scraped with the above headers. It's rude.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#35

In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (lik…

Your first assertion hasn't been true since the Statute of Anne in 1710 (the first copyright law). Commercially distributing information is subject to rules, regardless of who "benefits" or not.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#36
post #7

I don't understand how these AI summaries don't cannibalize Google's future profits. Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary. Who will be building future websites that nobody visits.

Scrape other people's content and slap your own ads on it. Oldest story on the web.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#37

I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…

>> And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it.

>Good! It's literally the Internet Archive and you published it on the internet. That was your choice.

>As a general rule, people shouldn't get to remove things from the historical record.

>Sometimes we make exceptions for things that were unlawful to publish in the first place -- e.g. defamation, national secrets, certain types of obscene photos -- where there's a larger harm otherwise.

>But if you make someone public, you make it public. I'm sorry you seem to at least partially regret that decision, but as a general rule, it's bad for humanity to allow people to erase things from what are now historical records we want to preserve.

But it's my content - it's not your content. I don't regret my decision, anything I really don't want public is behind a login. The website is still there, still getting crawled.

What really upsets me the MOST though is IA won't even reply to my requests to tell me "We're not going to remove it" - your reply (I am assuming from your wording you have some relationship with them, apologies if that's not the case) is the only information I've got! (Thanks)

[Note reply was from user crazygringo but I can't find it now, almost like they... removed it? It was public though and I'm SURE they won't mind me archiving it here for them.]

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#38

I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.

Also, little chance that down the road they'll contact you asking if you want to pay to be described more positively than your competitors.

Or asking if you want to pay to remove false information that they generate which makes you look bad.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#39

In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (lik…

IMHO, that’s a pretty entitled view of the whole process. I’ve published software under a license that disallows certain uses of it. Just because it is published doesn’t mean that it should be usable in any way that anybody wants.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#40

I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.

Also, little chance that down the road they'll contact you asking if you want to pay to be described more positively than your competitors. Or asking if you want to pay to remove false information that they generate which makes you look bad.

I don't doubt that it going to get ugly as these companies desparately try to claw back some of the billions they have spent on LLMs. Buckle up.
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