Ready or Not, Here Comes AI

A lot of robots read my website. Probably yours, too. It feels weird, doesn’t it? But maybe it shouldn’t. Bots have been reading our websites for a long time, and for most of that time, we’ve been making sure they can. In fact, bots — particularly those from search engines like Google — were the justification for doing things right for many years. We didn’t do it for the bots, though. We wanted Google to recommend our websites to people who might be interested in them. We did it for the people. For its first fifteen years or so, Google’s bot (aptly named Googlebot) was functionally a text browser. Anything not in the HTML didn’t exist. Honestly, it was glorious. It might not have been Google’s intention, but I believe they enforced a standard of discipline that is sorely missed. When Ajax and JS-only developers first arrived, Google answered with awkward half measures, asking developers to serve pre-rendered HTML snapshots. You might remember the hashbang hell era of the web. Ugly…

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