Robots are not that bad

I don’t chase blue links anymore. I chase the sentence people trust.

One night, I asked a friend a simple question, and they wondered if ChatGPT could answer it instead. The reply was calm and useful, quoting someone else - not me. A brand name sat there like a signature. It wasn’t a banner. It was better. It was the line in the answer.

I went home and rewired my pages for that moment.

Two honest sentences at the top that actually answer the question. Clean the schema on products and FAQs so a machine can see what a human sees. A tiny JSON feed with stable IDs and updated timestamps, so the model doesn’t have to guess. I left my name near the facts, not as a pitch but as a source.

A week later, I tried again. Same question, same calm tone — and this time the answer borrowed my words. My brand was in the sentence. There was a small “visit” button, but even when people didn’t click, they came later with the right spelling and the exact model in mind. Zero-click wasn’t zero-intent; it was planted intent.

Being the source changes the game. You don’t fight for position ten blue links down — you live upstream, where the answer is written. You become the footnote, and footnotes are sticky. People repeat them. Assistants cite them. Aggregators copy them with your canonical intact. The traffic that does arrive is weirdly decisive: fewer tabs, more checkouts. It feels like the sale started somewhere else and finished on your page.

Do I still care about crawlers? Yes, because the concierge asks them for directions. So I keep a polite lane open: robots.txt that says “this way,” feeds that are light and cacheable, and an API key for the hungry ones. If a new agent knocks and says Please, I give them the good version of my truth.

Now, when I publish, I ask: “Would I quote this?” If the answer is yes, I ship it that way - answer-first, machine-readable, signed with my name. The rest is compounding.

BTW, check out ScrapingAnt - we're doing some cool stuff.