79% of the largest news websites in the UK and US are blocking AI training bots, with 34% blocking all bots analysed. Publishers are blocking bots due to the lack of value exchange and the need for traffic to survive.

Almost eight in ten of the biggest news websites in the UK and US are now blocking AI training bots. A recent analysis by Buzzstream shows that 79% of the top 100 news websites are blocking at least one crawler used for AI training, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot. The BBC, The New York Times, and The Telegraph are among the publishers that have blocked all the AI bots included in the analysis. Publishers are blocking AI bots using the robots.txt file because there’s almost no value exchange, and AI companies are not willing to pay for the content their models have been trained on.