“Comparing our findings to other work suggests that news publishers are more likely to block compared to popular websites more generally.”
– Dr. Richard Fletcher
Almost half of news websites (48%) in ten countries block OpenAI’s ChatGPT series from scraping their material, and half of those block scraping for Google’s Gemini large language model as well (24%). The findings are in a new “factsheet” by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The research found blocking was more common by legacy news publishers than by digitally-native news sites or broadcasters.
Both OpenAI and Google provided instructions for preventing their web crawlers from accessing website content.
How many news websites block AI crawlers? | REUTERS INSTITUE FOR THE STUDY OF JOURNALISM | February 22, 2024 | by Dr. Richard Fletcher