ai crawlers eating website traffic websites blocking ai a solid castle battlement wall

AI Is Eating Website Traffic, Websites Are Blocking AI: Reliable Information Is Getting Harder to Find

August 31, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Comment off

On 31 August 2026 Dana McKay and Damiano Spina of RMIT University argued in The Conversation that the web’s thirty-year deal between crawlers and websites has collapsed: AI crawlers take content to train models and write answers while sending almost no traffic back, reputable publishers respond by blocking them, and AI answers increasingly draw on the low-quality and AI-generated sites that do not block. This piece sets out their argument, the Pew, Wikipedia and Cloudflare data behind it, the three peer-reviewed studies that show the quality trap is real, Cloudflare’s 15 September default block, pay-per-use and licensing, and what readers and UK businesses should do now.

veracity ai fact checking reliability scores a upright thermometer round bulb

Veracity Reveals the Sources Behind Its AI Fact Checks With 0-100% Reliability Scores

August 27, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Comment off

Veracity is an open-source fact-checking system from Montreal’s Complex Data Lab that pairs a large language model with a web retrieval agent and refuses to answer without showing its evidence. Every claim comes back as a reliability score between 0% and 100%, a plain-English interpretation, a share recommendation gated at 60%, and a panel listing every source consulted along with its documented credibility. This breakdown covers the five-stage pipeline, the stack behind it, why the 60% cutoff is the most questionable decision in the design, what independent benchmarks say about the roughly 83% real-world accuracy ceiling for automated fact-checking, and how to evaluate any claim-scoring layer before you let it near a workflow.