The internet’s oldest bargain is breaking.

 For decades, websites welcomed crawlers. Getting scraped — by Google or any search engine — meant getting indexed, ranked, discovered. For every two bots it sent to a website, Google sent one user. So scraping meant web traffic — and business.

But now, as generative artificial intelligence tools race to ingest the entire internet, scraping means getting bypassed. According to Cloudflare, for every user that ChatGPT maker OpenAI sends to a site, it sends 1,500 bots. For Anthropic, that figure is 60,000. Traffic from human visits is flattening while automated traffic surges — sometimes outnumbering people entirely.

And unlike the Google era, these bots usually don’t link back to their source material. Instead, AI models summarize and serve answers inside their own interfaces, keeping users locked in — and cutting websites and content creators out of the loop.