Is it because people viewed it as Google scraping the site to make an index so that people could find the site, while the AI scraping is intended so people won’t need to visit the site at all?
Usually though from time to time over many many years from when G was still wet behind the ears I have had to write specific defences effectively just to deal with it.
The AI apps (namely chatgpt and Claude) are evolving to display external data with widgets that will potentially drive more traffic than google has been doing for a long time. Might be worth changing focus as SEO killed google.
