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   Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Jun-2025 19:30:35 JST Richard MacManus

   1/2 "People aren't following the footnotes." That's a good line from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, referencing the ever-dwindling referral traffic from Google, OpenAI and Perplexity due to AI answers (https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/ai-search-traffic-publishers). He was promoting Cloudflare's ability to block AI crawlers to help publishers "extract concessions" (as Rebooting puts it: https://www.therebooting.com/ai-optimism-in-the-riviera/)

   • Tim Chambers repeated this.
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     Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Jun-2025 19:30:35 JST Richard MacManus

     in reply to

     2/2 I must admit, as a small indie publisher (with Cybercultural), I'm torn on this. I use Cloudflare, but if I turn on the AI blocker — which I haven't yet — then doesn't that make my already minimal distribution even worse? How do I build up my publisher brand if I don't show up in the AI overviews? You might think this is besides the point (AI bad!!), but unless you're a relatively big online publisher that gets Google Discover traffic, there are very few other ways to have your content seen.