In response, Automattic published a policy outlining user controls, making content sharing opt-in by default, but providing a method to opt-out.
They claim only public, non opted-out content will be shared with select AI partners that agree to attribution and user controls.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress explains that WordPress.org users are unaffected. “I can confirm that the WordPress project is not involved in selling user data or content for AI training purposes. This has been our consistent stance across the long history of WordPress…”
Automattic’s stance is that since AI laws don’t exist yet, they are proactively giving users more control over public content distribution.
However, making the content sharing opt-in by default has drawn criticism over lack of informed consent.
What do you say? Should platforms profit from user data while AI laws remain unclear?
The robots.txt file has been around since the dark ages of the Internet, creating a social contract between site owners and web crawlers about the indexing of a website.
Robots.txt has no legal authority, so crawlers that want to ignore it can. It relies largely on the goodwill of parties involved.
Originally focused on allowing/blocking search engine bots, robots.txt is now being used to block AI training data collection.
Crawling sites for AI training data is seen by many publishers as extractive, with no value given back.
Over 300 of the top 1000 websites now block GPTBot specifically. Other AI bots like Google’s and Anthropic’s are also starting to get blocked more.
How well can a 30-year-old handshake deal regulate AI’s insatiable data needs? Is it time for a new deal?
A bug in Google’s new Local Services Ads (first reported by SEO expert, Joy Hawkins) is causing some businesses to appear in search results for competitor brand name queries.
This fails user intent as people expect to only see the searched brand, not competitors, when searching for a specific business.
Google has acknowledged it as a bug that they are working on fixing, clarifying it should only show your business for brand queries.
The bug surfaced weeks after Google introduced Direct Business Search allowing brands to appear for branded queries.
Charges are only meant to apply when leads come from new, not existing, customers.
This failure to fulfill search intent and misdirection of customers has caused frustration over the problematic Local Services Ads rollout.
Are you or your clients being affected by this bug?
