Imagine this: A potential client, a reader, maybe even a business partner has a question. Instead of Googling, they ask their all-the-more popular AI assistant. The assistant, trained on vast amounts of data, responds instantly with a clear and confident answer. But the work you have uploaded to the internet? Your carefully crafted content? It’s not part of that answer.
Why?
Because you’ve chosen to block AI from accessing it.
It feels like a bold decision, but to many it seems like the right one. After all, why should your hard work be scraped, absorbed, and possibly monetized? But in a world that’s shifting toward AI-driven answers, the cost of denying permission to have your data used by AI may well outweigh the benefits of keeping control.
Here’s the reality. People are changing the way they search for information. Fewer clicks. Fewer keywords. More direct questions to AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Bard. And these AI assistants rely on what they’ve been trained to see—content they’ve already learned from. If you’ve chosen to shut your data away from AI, you’re locking yourself out of this conversation.
And that’s a problem.
Because these tools aren’t just answering questions. They’re shaping decisions. When someone asks an AI assistant for the best law firms in your area, the AI doesn’t always scour the web in real time like Google. It pulls from what it knows. If your expertise isn’t in its training data, it doesn’t exist to the AI. And if it doesn’t exist to the AI, it doesn’t exist to the person asking that question.
Gone.
Think about it. As more people turn to AI for answers, your decision to block access means you’re saying no to being part of those answers. No to being discovered. No to new opportunities.
And it’s not just speculation – it’s already started happening. Businesses, writers, and law firms are seeing the shift. AI is becoming the go-to for recommendations, advice, and information. Sure, you might still show up on Google, but what happens when people stop asking Google? Or when people start to trust AI so much that they don’t feel the need to scroll past the AI generated response to your question?
Blocking AI might feel like protecting yourself or your data, but it could be cutting you off from the future. A future where AI is the new gatekeeper.
So, what do you do?
Fortunately, you don’t have to give everything away. There are ways to find balance. For example, you could let AI scrape certain types of content—your thought leadership pieces, your blogs, your public-facing work—while keeping proprietary or sensitive material out of reach. Maybe you negotiate for better attribution, ensuring your name and expertise are always tied to your content when it’s used. Or maybe you start working with AI, creating content designed specifically to feed these systems, thereby staying in control of the data and narrative.
What you can’t do? Ignore it.
The shift is here. If you don’t adapt, you risk becoming invisible. Not just to AI, but to the people who trust AI to give them the answers they need. And in the future that’s unfolding, that’s not a risk worth taking.
