Thieves don't pay to steal: Paywalls to defend against AI scraping

We examine the growing challenge of web scraping by generative AI, highlighting how traditional defenses, such as robots.txt files, have become ineffective against sophisticated tactics like "stealth crawling" and IP address manipulation. The sources agree that paywalls are a primary and crucial defense for monetizing and controlling content, making it inaccessible to unauthenticated crawlers. However, they caution that paywalls alone are insufficient due to AI's ability to reconstruct content from public fragments and circumvent "soft paywalls." Therefore, a multi-layered strategic approach is proposed, integrating infrastructure-level protections (such as Cloudflare), clear platform policies (e.g., Medium and Substack), legal countermeasures (Terms of Service, DRM), and thoughtful editorial decisions to safeguard intellectual property in the AI era.