Agents or Bots? Making Sense of AI on the Open Web
Modern AI assistants work fundamentally differently from traditional web crawling.
TL;DR
- Modern AI assistants function as user-driven agents, fetching specific information on demand, unlike traditional web crawlers.
- AI assistants use fetched content immediately to answer user questions and do not store it for training.
- Cloudflare is accused of mischaracterizing AI assistants as malicious bots, leading to overblocking.
- Overblocking harms users by restricting access to information for research, comparisons, and news.
- This practice threatens the open web by creating a two-tiered internet and undermining user choice.
- Cloudflare's technical analysis is questioned, with accusations of misattributing traffic and fundamental misunderstandings of AI assistants.
- The controversy suggests Cloudflare's systems may be inadequate for distinguishing legitimate AI from threats.