Do I even want my products/content consumable by AI?

This is a question posed to me by one of my readers in response to Monday’s post.

You are going to hate this but the answer is “It depends”.

I am having this exact discussion with my big e-commerce client right now. Let me ask you the same question I am asking them:

If it leads to a sale being made and a happy customer, does it really matter if it is a human or a bot doing the browsing?

I suggest you seriously consider the answer to this. This is NOT a leading question.

I can think of a lot of reasons to limit bots from viewing your site.

If it is used to train Google’s LLM with content you are trying to become the expert in just so Google can turn around and give an AI summary that robs you of the traffic Google used to send your way then the answer is likely no.

But that is a double edged sword. What are you going to do? Block Google and lose out on what little SEO traffic Google is sending you?

If you are running a business and it doesn’t lead to a sale then the answer might be no but if it does then you will likely want to consider it.

If, on the other hand, you are running a business like Facebook or Reddit where you are selling human attention for money to your advertisers you are likely shaking in your boots. Your injected ads will be consumed and filtered out by AI agents and never hit the eyes of the humans you are trying to advertise to.

Want help making this decision?

Take a close look at the user agents hitting your site. As adoption of this technology increases and people like my mother start to use agents they won’t be technically savvy enough to bother to hide their user agent.

If you want to get advanced, inject a query param into the product URLs you give the LLMs and see if a real user shows up later to check out with that URL.

Keep an eye on the agentic traffic, and more importantly whether or not that traffic results in a sale.

My question for you is if bot traffic is resulting in sales does it really matter? Let me know your thoughts!