Zero-click Search

[rcjordan]

AI search could kill the web without new quality signals and revenue models
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/01/ai-search-could-kill-the-web-without-new-quality-signals-and-revenue-models/5265269

[littleman]

Thinking this through to farther down the chain of events and it gets interesting.  The knowledge base of AI will get stale as it kills off the very source of it's knowledge.  Then what happens? 

Side: Do we know if the AI crawlers are respecting robots.txt?  Will every publicist start blocking AI en mass as an act of self-preservation?  I could see Google making it really difficult to separate out the SE access from Gemini access.

[rcjordan]

>AI crawlers are respecting robots.txt?

Reports say they are not, hence all the cloudflare scanning added by sites.

>blocking

We've mentioned it here a little bit, but there is now a growing realization that G should be blocked if it is not sending significant traffic. As a webmaster and/or advertiser that is hard to accept.

That said, the now-evil G may access it anyway.

[Brad]

It's going to take something more than robots.txt. We can assume that AI has not and will not respect robots.txt when it suits them to ignore it.