Offer extended:

Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 12.

SUBSCRIBE

WTF is OpenAI’s GPTBot?

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

Publishers have a new tool in their efforts to limit AI’s threat to their businesses. And it’s from the company behind one of the predominant threats.

In August, OpenAI announced that website owners can now block its GPTBot web crawler from accessing their webpages’ content. Since then, 12% of the 1000 most-visited sites online have done so, according to Originality AI. The list of sites shutting themselves off to OpenAI’s web crawlers includes publishers such as Bloomberg, CNN and The New York Times.

As Digiday has covered, publishers have had a hard time protecting against generative AI tools like ChatGPT sidestepping their paywalls and siphoning their content to inform the large language models. OpenAI’s announcement, however, makes that undertaking much easier.

For those unfamiliar with what a web crawler like OpenAI’s GPTBot is, not to mention how websites are able block their access, check out the explainer video skit below.

More in Media

WTF is AI citation tracking?

Publishers are tracking AI citations to understand visibility, attribution gaps and referral traffic in these tools and platforms.

As big brands flood the podcast ad space, startups are refining strategies to stand out

While a influx of big advertisers is good news for podcast companies, it also makes it more challenging for small- to mid-sized brands to stand out in the space.

Meta enters AI licensing fray, striking deals with People Inc., USA Today Co. and more

The platform has secured seven multi-year deals with publishers including CNN, Fox News, People Inc., USA Today Co to incorporate their content into its large language model (LLM) Llama.