We Didn’t Block GenAI from Mongabay. The Results Were Surprising.
In recent years, many media outlets have chosen to block ChatGPT and other generative AI bots from accessing their content. There are strong arguments for doing so: concerns about copyright, the environmental cost of AI queries, and the broader implications of AI-driven content aggregation.
At Mongabay, we took a different approach. We decided not to block GenAI bots from our articles. Our reasoning was simple: the potential benefits of having our stories inform AI-generated responses outweighed the costs of inclusion. As a nonprofit media outlet, we already allow other publications to republish our articles—both commercially and non-commercially—as part of our impact strategy. If our business model depended primarily on ad revenue, the calculus might have been different.
I initially expected that GenAI would significantly reduce traffic to Mongabay. After all, if people could get the information they needed directly from an AI, why would they visit our website?
But that’s not what happened. ChatGPT is now one of our largest non-Google sources of traffic. Even more surprising, visitors coming from ChatGPT spend significantly more time reading our articles than those arriving from other platforms. We’re seeing a similar trend with Perplexity AI.
Definitely not the outcome I anticipated!
