What's difficult to explain? If you're having an agent crawl a handful of pages to answer a targeted query, that's clearly not mass scraping. If you're pulling down entire websites and storing their contents, that's clearly not normal use. Sure, there's a gray area, but I bet almost everyone who doesn't work for an AI company would be able to agree whether any given activity was "mass scraping" or "normal use".

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1shooner 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What is worse: 10,000 agents running daily targeted queries on your site, or 1 query pulling 10,000 records to cache and post-process your content without unnecessarily burdening your service?

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jakelazaroff 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I apprehend that you want me to say the first one is worse, but it's impossible with so few details. Like: worse for whom? in what way? to what extent?

If (for instance) my content changes often and I always want people to see an up-to-date version, the second option is clearly worse for me!

	▲	1shooner 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, I've been turning it over in my mind since this question started to emerge and I think it's complicated, I don't have an answer myself. After all, the first option is really just the correlate to today's web traffic, it's just no longer your traffic. You created the value, but you do not get the user attention. My apprehension is not with AI agents per se, it is the current, and likely future implementation: AI vendors selling the search and re-publication of other parties' content. In this relationship, neither option is great: either these providers are hammering your site on behalf of their subscribers' individual queries, or they are scraping and caching it, and reselling potentially stale information about you.