Bots harvesting content for AI companies have proliferated to the point that they’re threatening digital collections of arts and culture. Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) say they’re being overwhelmed by AI bots according to a report issued on Tuesday by the GLAM-E Lab. The surge in bots that gather data for AI training, the report says, often went unnoticed until it became so bad that it knocked online collections offline.
Source: Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data
Proposals to regulate artificial intelligence have been delayed by at least a year as UK ministers plan a bumper bill to regulate the technology and its use of copyrighted material. Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, intends to introduce a “comprehensive” AI bill in the next parliamentary session to address concerns about issues including safety and copyright.
To offer users a tidy AI summary instead of Google’s “10 blue links,” companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started sending out bots to retrieve and recap content in real time. According to data shared exclusively with The Washington Post, traffic from retrieval bots grew 49 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024.
The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.