I'm curious whether we'll hit a point where some sites will want to be as friendly to bots as possible (hopefully they'll just shift to having sane, rate-limited public APIs so everyone can save time and bandwidth), while the rest want the reverse.

If you're providing a service, and AI agents truly take off to where people say "Claude, go buy me a new shower hose about 5' long, brushed nickel. Use my usual evaluation criteria and don't spend over $20." then a lot of ecommerce stores are very very incentivized to be bot friendly.

And of course every "content" site is the reverse, wanting to not waste their bandwidth and hoping to score exclusive paid content deals with any entity that might want to scrape them.

I've already seen a small amount of transition in that direction. For instance:

Adafruit, last year: They blocked bots very heavy-handedly, including those that were there to gather information at the behest of a present-at-the-keyboard human. This made their products nearly invisible for those who were using ChatGPT instead of Google to find particular things to buy. Even when they were discoverable through forum postings, this added friction meant that I was unable to make a swift comparison betwixt their wares and those of others, and I wasn't buying anything from them because they were making deliberate choices that I felt were hostile to my process.

But that's changed.

Adafruit, at least a week or so ago: The bot was able to get in and find details about the stuff they sell. This lack of friction meant that I was able to make a swift comparison between their wares and those of others. I still bought the particular sensor-chip-on-a-board widget that I wanted elsewhere, but at least Adafruit's offerings were in the running this time.