I would assume most sites that block access to your AI assistant do so because they want to show a human ads, i.e. not run at a loss. Seems reasonable.
> This is ultimately just going to give them training material for how to avoid this crap.
> The arms race just took another step, and if you're spending money creating or hosting this kind of content, it's not going to make up for the money you're losing by your other content getting scraped.
So we should all just do nothing and accept the inevitable?
The README.md specifically states how to allow for nice robots to proceed unhindered. The people behind these efforts, I would imagine, don't particularly care about their sites' reputations in the cases people use LLMs for search.
The small non-profit I volunteer with finds Google ads to be surprisingly effective, and much more cost-effective than FB for what they do, so there's at least some Google search usage in the demographic that they serve.
Re: the design of the site. Please use higher contrast colours, especially the barely visible grey text on black background. It's annoying to try to read.
I think the county list is set in stone because Royal Mail refuses to update them (for some idiotic reason they still control the postcode database, which I guess lots of websites use and therefore use the old county names / boundaries). For example, it's still Humberside, even though that hasn't existed for decades.
Yep, I recall that Royal Mail is one of the websites that has the "Avon" issue. I don't know why they don't just update it to make it accurate as they update their PAF files for postcode lookups every three months with new postcodes. "Avon" is strange as it's still used in some contexts, such as the police force is known as Avon & Somerset
> Revolut works similarly. You don’t pay any fees on transfers to other Revolut accounts, but you do for other bank accounts.
Does it? I'd be surprised if it does in the UK at least, as all banks do free transfers to every other bank in the UK via Faster Payments. I thought it was the same in the EU?
That's already possible today yet there are still people who don't which is why a more general solution for the screen reader is needed rather than requiring every site developer to do something special.
We shouldn't create general solutions for people building software poorly. We should help people build software better, in this by helping to promote the use of a11y specs.
This is actually exactly where model providers could be doing some good. If they said a11y is the way for LLMs to interact with the web and helped push developers to docs, tutorials, etc the web would be better off. Google did effectively just that with HTTPS, they told everyone use it or lose SEO value rather than slapping some solution on Google's end to paper over poor security practices.
The only downside I can think of is that links to your website that are shared on Facebook / WhatsApp / Messenger won't be able to show a rich preview because they won't be able to access the OpenGraph tags on the shared page.
Rich previews are known to cause higher clickthroughs than non-rich previews (if you care about that).
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