Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
Cloudflare announced it will block AI training crawlers from accessing ad-supported websites by default starting September 15th, defaulting to allowing search crawling but blocking AI agents.
Where this was said
At 58:48 · chapter starts 56:30
Leo introduces Cloudflare's move to block AI bots from ad-supported websites, drawing a comparison to when Spanish news outlets blocked Google snippets — and then begged Google to come back. Jason Hiner delivers his sharpest indictment of the AI industry [1] — Jason Hiner "AI companies scraped the entire internet — copyright content and all — to train their models. Now Cloudflare is blocking those bots, but th…" 2:11:50 : the models were trained by scraping the entire open web, copyright and all. GPT-3 may have been 30–40% Reddit. The owners of that content never consented and never got paid. Now Cloudflare is locking the remaining 20%, but the theft has already happened. The AI companies' strategy, Jason says, is to grow large enough to go public, then settle the copyright lawsuits as a class action for pennies on the dollar. Lisa notes that AI overviews have already gutted affiliate revenue for consumer technology sites, and Owen describes watching Google's ad value collapse for a friend's business after the AI summary changes.
Google is scared for the first time in two decades. Its response — shoving more AI overviews at the users who haven't left yet — is backfiring. When Google I/O dropped and the new AI-heavy search launched, DuckDuckGo usage spiked. Google is hastening the very disruption it's trying to avoid.
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
Bhanu filters Ahrefs keyword results to show only those with a keyword difficulty below 10, making them realistic ranking targets for any decent website.
Bhanu sets a minimum search volume of 1,000 monthly searches when selecting keywords to target with free tools.
PropGPT averaged 20 downloads per day right after launching on the App Store through influencer marketing.
Eyal and Yali shut down all marketing and spent 4 months completely rebuilding PropGPT from scratch.
PropGPT has accumulated over 40,000 total downloads since launch.
PropGPT's large language model (AI) operating costs are just $20 per month, and the cost is continually falling.
Ad-based monetization works well for game apps where users spend extended time in-session, as seen with Grid and Wordle.
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