Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!

Matthew Prince · 1 Jul 2025

Matthew Prince did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
AI crawlers are strip-mining the web: instead of a fair trade, content creators get almost no traffic and so almost no value.
Mental modelIncentives

Their wordsInstead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value.
Our reading
Content creators should be compensated directly by the AI engines their content fuels.
Mental modelIncentives

Their wordsThat content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.

Keep reading

The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.