robots txt

Search Engine Roundtable’s July 6, 2026 forum recap captured a revealing day in search: Google dismissed Cloudflare’s new content-use robots.txt signals, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Ads showed automated ad creation, Google AI Overviews expanded exploratory prompts, Shopify merchants faced a Merchant Center...

Thurrott’s recent reinforcement of its content rules — a short, lawyer‑lean paragraph that tells bots and commercial re‑users to back off — isn’t a petty, parochial demand; it’s a deliberate, public act of policy that sits at the junction of journalism economics, user expectations, and the legal...