High Value Publishing
Join digital media veteran, Eric Shanfelt, each week as he helps magazine publishers and media companies grow their digital audiences, drive revenue, and improve their technology. We'll cover digital advertising, SEO, AI, social media, email, subscriptions, content distribution, and much more. Whether you publish an enthusiast / hobby magazine, a B2B trade magazine, an association journal, a regional consumer / business publication, or a local newspaper, each session has something that you can immediately apply to your business.
High Value Publishing
Should publishers block AI bots from scraping their content?
Eric Shanfelt joins the Local Media Association to take an in-depth look at whether publishers should block AI bots from their websites and, if so, how to do it. He explains the tradeoffs between AI visibility and website traffic, then walks through simple, real-world defenses you can implement without overcomplicating your stack.
You will learn:
- Traffic vs visibility: which matters more right now
- How to use robots.txt (and what not to block)
- How a firewall service like Cloudflare or Amazon Web Services can help
- Why local publishers should consider blocking international traffic
- The “back door” way AI bots can still index your sites.
We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the Local Media Association for hosting this session and for the work they do every day to support local publishers. Learn more and please consider joining LMA at https://www.localmedia.org/
Learn more at https://nearviewmedia.com/
