As AI bot visitors grows, content material creators are taking steps to guard their mental property from being scraped towards their will.
The publishing trade has spent the previous 12 months battling towards the encroachment of AI tech, with corporations like The New York Instances and Ziff Davis suing AI platforms for scraping their copyrighted content material and utilizing it to coach massive language fashions.
Now, particular person creators are becoming a member of the fray. Six content material creators and creator expertise managers advised Digiday that AI scraping of their content material was an growing concern going into the top of 2025, with three taking particular steps to dam AI bot visitors and legally defend towards the scraping of copyrighted content material.
“When individuals consider publishers, they consider these huge, conventional media publishers — however there are a lot of smaller publishers, like ourselves,” stated Sarah Leung, a meals content material creator behind the YouTube channel The Woks of Life. Along with her YouTube presence, Leung operates a well-liked web site that includes recipes and life-style weblog posts.
Creators like Leung, whose companies depend on visitors on an owned web site, moderately than a third-party media platform, are more and more discovering themselves on the entrance strains of the battle with AI bots. To guard their written content material towards bot scraping, Leung and different creators like meals author Gina Homolka have partnered with the media firm Raptive so as to add authorized phrases and circumstances explicitly prohibiting the observe to their web sites, in addition to implementing a WordPress plugin that blocks AI bot visitors.
“Proper now, I don’t assume any creator can fully cease AI from scraping, however I’m taking steps to guard my work the place I can,” stated Homolka, who operates the web site Skinnytaste. “I’m a part of Raptive, they usually’ve standardized Creator Phrases of Content material Use for all of us, which helps set clear boundaries round how our work can be utilized.”
To encourage its creators to make use of the blockers, Raptive ran a examine between Might 2024 and June 2025 to measure the impression of blocking AI bots on creators’ general visitors or search rankings. The examine discovered that blocking a number of AI bots didn’t result in a big lower in visitors for taking part creators.
“In some circumstances, those that had blocked [the AI scraping bot] Google-Prolonged had been exhibiting up extra typically than those that had not,” stated Raptive chief development officer Marc McCollum.
And AI bot scraping is definitely on the rise. Throughout the online, AI-based bot exercise has elevated by 225 % throughout the 2025 calendar 12 months, in line with knowledge shared by the content material supply expertise firm Akamai.
A extra weak group
Essentially, creators’ complaints about AI bot scraping are rooted in the identical issues which have motivated conventional publishers’ lawsuits towards AI platforms. Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that any creators will mount authorized challenges towards OpenAI any time quickly. Virtually, publishers’ challenges are based mostly on AI bots scraping lots of of 1000’s of unique works, amounting to massive potential damages that would justify a lawsuit. Particular person creators have fewer particular claims towards AI platforms — and in addition lack the authorized budgets to maintain a lawsuit.
“They nonetheless have a legitimate declare; their declare is simply as legitimate because the publishers’,” stated Jesse Saivar, an IP lawyer on the agency Greenberg Glusker. “It’s simply that, A., they seemingly don’t have the cash to battle the declare, and, B., they aren’t taking a look at wherever close to the kind of restoration that the publishers would have.”
As an alternative of specializing in their authorized choices, Saivar stated that creators can be higher served by specializing in technological options to the AI bot scraping downside, reminiscent of Raptive’s WordPress plugin. Nonetheless, particular person creators are additionally extra weak than conventional publishers from a technical standpoint. Though corporations like Raptive are actively creating free instruments that creators can use to dam AI bot scraping, these instruments are sometimes not as strong because the enterprise-level options accessible to conventional publishers keen to fork over the money. Charges for premium bot-blocking instruments sometimes value 1000’s of {dollars} per 30 days, with annual subscription prices working within the tens of 1000’s.
Till now, publishers have largely relied on robots.txt — basically an honor system that many AI crawlers merely ignore — leaving them with little recourse when scrapers bypass these guidelines. However content material supply community distributors like Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai have been attempting to assist their writer shoppers extra successfully detect and block bots, together with AI crawlers that scrape content material with out permission.
However that’s not an possibility for particular person creators. Akamai, for instance, doesn’t supply its bot-blocking merchandise to any particular person creators, as a substitute specializing in relationships with conventional publishers who can afford its providers.
“There’s choices on the market for particular person publishers to guard their web sites by utilizing freemium variations of bot-management merchandise,” stated Akamai director of engineering, fraud and abuse, David Senecal. “Nevertheless it all is dependent upon how aggressive the scraper is to get the content material.”
