Should your business let the AI search crawlers in? - Raconteur

It’s a conundrum that’s likely to form the basis of MBA case studies in years to come. Imagine you run a firm that’s successfully selling a product or service. Like most modern companies, it relies on online referrals via traditional search engines for a significant chunk of its business. This model is then disrupted by a new wave of AI-powered tools that also crawl the web in their quest for answers.

Giving them access to your website could ensure that your firm will be mentioned in the responses that OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, say, gives to user queries such as: “Who makes the best-value widgets in the UK?” But, in doing so, you must hand over some of your precious intellectual property to feed the large-language model (LLM) that powers this technology. You could prevent its web crawler from accessing your site, but in protecting your property this way you’d risk being overlooked in the chatbot’s answers.

So which option should you choose? Do you let ChatGPT and its ilk run freely over your firm’s website or do you shut the crawlers out?

ChatGPT citations can boost revenue

This scenario has become a reality for businesses worldwide in recent months. ChatGPT’s sensational public introduction in November 2022 represented a seismic shift in information discovery. It’s not only ChatGPT, which also powers Microsoft’s conversational search engine Bing, that’s changing the game. In response to OpenAI’s success and partnership with Microsoft, Google is planning to...

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