Google's Gary Illyes: AI made bot impersonation worse as training-data hunger grows
gaganghotra_ · x · 2026-10-30
Google's Gary Illyes says bot impersonation—rogue crawlers pretending to be Googlebot—has gotten much worse because of AI.
In an Odys Podcast interview, he explains that companies hunting training data treat the web as a content farm to harvest, and while firewalls and CDNs keep improving at identifying crawlers, they still let unwanted traffic through; knowing exactly who is crawling you is what lets site owners make blocking decisions.
Related event: Google's Illyes Warns AI Worsens Crawler Impersonation(2 posts)→
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