Microsoft to Publishers: Don't Block the AI Bots
Microsoft is advising publishers to allow AI bots to scrape their websites instead of blocking them. Nikhil Kolar, VP of publisher product at Microsoft AI, emphasized that this approach can enhance visibility and traffic for publishers. The company is also facilitating licensing agreements to ensure publishers receive fair compensation for their data.
- ▪Microsoft encourages publishers to create content that is accessible to AI bots.
- ▪Currently, four out of five websites block AI bot traffic, limiting their visibility.
- ▪Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace aims to help publishers monetize their data through licensing agreements.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,266 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | AdExchanger |
| Canonical URL | https://www.adexchanger.com/publishers/microsoft-to-publishers-dont-block-the-ai-bots/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 06:38:14 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T06:52:46.079Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T06:52:46.079Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | QpW366rEDNu2 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Publishers Microsoft To Publishers: Don’t Block The AI Bots By Anthony Vargas Tuesday, May 26th, 2026 – 12:45 am SHARE: Microsoft AI's Nikhil Kolar chats with AdExchanger's Allison Schiff at Programmatic AI 2026 in Las Vegas. Microsoft has one big piece of advice for publishers and retailers that are cautiously navigating the AI era: Let the bots scrape your sites. That’s according to Nikhil Kolar, VP of publisher product at Microsoft AI, who spoke at AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI event in Las Vegas last week. Rather than fighting against the rising tide of AI-based search engines and agentic tools, Kolar said publishers and retailers should actually be creating content that can speak directly to these bots (and thus the LLMs generating new forms of traffic).
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at AdExchanger.
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