But it also destroys the business model behind the site.
replySure, you could technically redesign to handle the bot traffic, but if the bot traffic is just taking the data and reducing any need for humans to visit the site, why is he putting in the effort to maintain the site?
The business model of the site is apparently private data sales, not ad revenue.
replyBots don't make purchasing decisions.
replyWell, why is he? If it's for ad revenue, this problem is surely global to the web. If it's because he likes to do it, it shouldn't matter if one AI or a trillion scrape the site. I feel like we badly need a rethink of the web architecture after DoubleClick anyway. Maybe the name of the game should be to cut down a site's assets very hard and use static hosting for them. This interferes with crummy sites that show a mess of inlined ads every refresh, but now that there are a billion 'poor users' this is no longer feasible.
replyMaybe more an inherent problem with these chatbots.
replyLLMs are great, but they aren't producing new information. You still need people for that. But if you cut down any incentive for the people to do that, the LLMs will starve.