Paul Graham: paywalls are invisible to AI — "captcha for humans," bots get through
dbasch · x · 2026-10-18
Paul Graham argues that publishing on a paywalled site makes your work invisible: "If AIs can't find it, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist" — not yet 100% true, but only getting truer.
dbasch quote-posts with the sharper framing: paywalls are captchas for humans — bots can get around them, humans can't. Together they highlight an inverted incentive in the AI era: walls built to stop crawlers now remove content from AI-mediated discovery, hurting paying readers most.
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