Someone pointed this out on Twitter - it looks like StackOverflow recently updated their robots.txt file to explicitly disallow all crawlers. Obviously, this won't stop those that don't respect robots.txt, but I found this decision strange. Not even Google or Bing's crawlers (which respect robots.txt) will be able to crawl StackOverflow, which could be the final nail in the coffin for SO, since (presumably) most StackOverflow traffic comes from search engines.
Someone pointed this out on Twitter - it looks like StackOverflow recently updated their robots.txt file to explicitly disallow all crawlers. Obviously, this won't stop those that don't respect robots.txt, but I found this decision strange. Not even Google or Bing's crawlers (which respect robots.txt) will be able to crawl StackOverflow, which could be the final nail in the coffin for SO, since (presumably) most StackOverflow traffic comes from search engines.
I just tested it with ChatGPT agent mode and it returned a 502 bad gateway, so even agents are not going to be a source of traffic.
They must really want only organic traffic for some reason.
- With the advent of LLMs, sites like StackOverflow are effectively obsolete—robots.txt or not.
- It’s the inevitable consequence when companies cease to innovate.
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