The more I think about this, the more sense it makes.
We can rescind our invitation to Google.

https://adactio.com/journal/20315

Permission

You have the power, not Google.

@ademagic [strokes chin] I'm listening.

@pjohanneson discoverability of my website via the search engine is less important to me. Besides, I have linkedin and other socials for that.

I put more value in connections with people who find my site in the places i share it. So why have the bots crawl me at all?

@pjohanneson not even mentioning the other things the article talks about, like my data, traffic to my server, training LLMs etc etc.

Didn't really think about it in the past. Being crawled by google is just a thing to do. Never really considered the why until now.

@ademagic Yeah, the bulk of the traffic1 to my personal site comes from Facebook, as far as I can tell. The more business-focused sites I deal with might be a harder sell.

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1 The traffic I get, anyway.

@pjohanneson yeah likely still necessary for business sites, i assume they usually rely on search for discovery.

I suppose my takeaway is to ask the question and consciously decide. It shouldn't be a "must do".