Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
johnjianwang.medium.com
Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
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Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#2> LLMs are the next generation’s search layer. They’re already generating massive amounts of pipeline for the companies and websites that have gotten good at getting their content displayed in LLMs
[citation needed]
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#3It’s not dumb because Googlebot follows the robots.txt rules. That is the sincere crux of it all. No one is going to casually open their site up to Llms that are blatantly scraping their site to then use their information to displace them.
Not blocking violent, bad-actor scrapers is dumb. Letting through bad-actor scrapers because a bunch of rich people want to make it the norm is dumb.
Llms are not directing traffic to the sites and that is the tradeoff that site owners allow with Googlebot. Even if Perplexity or Claude will provide a source, the Llm user is most likely not asking/clicking for it 99% of the time.
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#4That is basically several paragraphs to just say "well you should just adapt to the new world instead of pushing against bad practices". There is barely any "why" actually said here.
We just had the article about how AI search is leading to less clicks, so where is that supposed "pipeline"?
Also completely ignores how you may not want your information to be misconstrued (lied basically) to the user with a helpful link telling them where the source is, but they may never click through. And worse if they know that the information being told to them is wrong, they may then think it was because your site was wrong and trust you less, all without ever clicking that link.
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#5“Providing high quality content that LLMs will actually cite is the new game in town.”
That is not my job nor is it my goal. These companies are taking my work, repurposing it, and selling it under the assumption that because they can access it they can sell it.
Maybe the OP should leave their house door open so people can come in and use his couch. The new game in town is to let other people use your couch.
The mental gymnastics in this post qualify for the Special Olympics.
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#6This post gets the reason why people are cutting off LLMs exactly backwards and consequently completely fails to address the core issue. The whole reason people are blocking LLMs is precisely that they believe it kills the flow of readers to your content. The LLMs present your ideas and content, maybe with super-tiny attribution that nobody notices or uses [1], maybe with no attribution at all, and you get nothing. People are blocking LLMs with the precise intent of trying to preserve the flow to their content, be it commercially, reputationally, whatever.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-us...
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#7> how many of you wouldn’t hook up your website to Google?
If there was a paid-only search engine with dubious ethics practices that was overwhelming my site with traffic in order resell search trained off of (among other things) my personally generated content, I would absolute block it.
LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.
> it also cuts you off from the fastest-growing distribution channel on the web.
I haven't seen the needle tip at all in my acquisition channels from LLMs. Unless you're a household name or very large, LLMs aren't going to shill for your business.
> most LLMs have an agentic web-search component that will actively generate links
Totally. Which is why I don't care if the LLMs index it. Let web content search be good, and lead LLMs to good content; product placement in LLM weights ain't what I'm gonna optimize for, or even permit, if it comes at a cost to me and my infra.
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#8Incredibly simplistic. I’m having a hard time believing a real person wrote this, read it over and decided they had made anything resembling a point.
How about the fact that Google (ideally) sends users to you rather than sharing your work unattributed?
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#9Even if we take the argument at face value, we should allow LLMs to train their models for free, on the backs of real people's work, just so that there's a chance that they actually improved well enough to replace humans, all that just to have a temporary boost on search discovery of our content.
Not to mention LLMs still spew a lot of badly wrong results (no I will not anthropomorphize the models, they're not ready yet).
This is one heck of a poison chalice. 王先生，你願意喝這杯鶴酒嗎？
Re: Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search
#10Like everything else on the web, LLMs are going to eventually be ruined by marketing teams trying to get them to say "Pepsi" instead of "Coke."