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As AI bot traffic grows, content creators are taking steps to protect their intellectual property from being scraped against their will.
The publishing industry has spent the past year battling against the encroachment of AI tech, with companies like The New York Times and Ziff Davis suing AI platforms for scraping their copyrighted content and using it to train large language models.
Now, individual creators are joining the fray. Six content creators and creator talent managers told Digiday that AI scraping of their content was an increasing concern going into the end of 2025, with three taking specific steps to block AI bot traffic and legally defend against the scraping of copyrighted content.
“When people think of publishers, they think of those big, traditional media publishers — but there are many smaller publishers, like ourselves,” said Sarah Leung, a food content creator behind the YouTube channel The Woks of Life. In addition to her YouTube presence, Leung operates a popular website featuring recipes and lifestyle blog posts.
Creators like Leung, whose businesses rely on traffic on an owned website, rather than a third-party media platform, are increasingly finding themselves on the front lines of the battle with AI bots. To protect their written content against bot scraping, Leung and other creators like food writer Gina Homolka have partnered with the media company Raptive to add legal terms and conditions explicitly prohibiting the practice to their websites, as well as implementing a WordPress plugin that blocks AI bot traffic.
“Right now, I don’t think any creator can completely stop AI from scraping, but I am taking steps to protect my work where I can,” Homolka said. “I’m part of Raptive, and they’ve standardized Creator Terms of Content Use for all of us, which helps set clear boundaries around how our work can be used.”
To encourage its creators to use the blockers, Raptive ran a study between May 2024 and June 2025 to measure the impact of blocking AI bots on creators’ overall traffic or search rankings. The study found that blocking one or more AI bots did not lead to a significant decrease in traffic for participating creators.
“In some cases, those who had blocked [the AI scraping bot] Google-Extended were showing up more often than those who had not,” said Raptive chief growth officer Marc McCollum.
And AI bot scraping is certainly on the rise. Across the web, AI-based bot activity has increased by 225 percent during the 2025 calendar year, according to data shared by the content delivery technology company Akamai.
A more vulnerable group
Fundamentally, creators’ complaints about AI bot scraping are rooted in the same concerns that have motivated traditional publishers’ lawsuits against AI platforms. However, it’s unlikely that any creators will mount legal challenges against OpenAI any time soon. Practically, publishers’ challenges are based on AI bots scraping hundreds of thousands of original works, amounting to large potential damages that could justify a lawsuit. Individual creators have fewer specific claims against AI platforms — and also lack the legal budgets to sustain a lawsuit.
“They still have a valid claim; their claim is just as valid as the publishers’,” said Jesse Saivar, an IP lawyer at the firm Greenberg Glusker. “It’s just that, A., they likely don’t have the money to fight the claim, and, B., they are not looking at anywhere near the type of recovery that the publishers would have.”
Instead of focusing on their legal options, Saivar said that creators would be better served by focusing on technological solutions to the AI bot scraping problem, such as Raptive’s WordPress plugin. However, individual creators are also more vulnerable than traditional publishers from a technical standpoint. Although companies like Raptive are actively developing free tools that creators can use to block AI bot scraping, these tools are often not as robust as the enterprise-level solutions available to traditional publishers willing to fork over the cash. Fees for premium bot-blocking tools typically cost thousands of dollars per month, with annual subscription costs running in the tens of thousands.
Until now, publishers have largely relied on robots.txt — essentially an honor system that many AI crawlers simply ignore — leaving them with little recourse when scrapers bypass those rules. But content delivery network vendors like Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai have been trying to help their publisher clients more effectively detect and block bots, including AI crawlers that scrape content without permission.
But that’s not an option for individual creators. Akamai, for example, does not offer its bot-blocking products to any individual creators, instead focusing on relationships with traditional publishers who can afford its services.
“There’s options out there for individual publishers to protect their websites by using freemium versions of bot-management products,” said Akamai director of engineering, fraud and abuse, David Senecal. “But it all depends on how aggressive the scraper is to get the content.”
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