Join us Oct. 26-28 in Newport Beach for the Digiday Media Buying Summit
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
Ad industry tallies early losses from Apple’s Safari tracking block
A week after Apple’s Safari block, the ad industry is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Welcome to Creator University: Inside the colleges building creator economy programs
As more young folks seek to enter the creator economy, universities are offering classes covering every layer of the still-growing ecosystem.
For some publishers, agentic advertising is still a question of ROI
Despite the hype around agentic media buying, some publishers remain skeptical of its potential to deliver meaningful revenue.