What's this about?
TheNumbers.com — the film industry's beloved free box-office database, run for decades by a tiny team — has effectively collapsed. Stephen Follows' post-mortem points at the new economics of the AI web: crawler load up, referral traffic down, zero-click answers eating the reason to visit.
What exactly is the "zero-click" problem?
AI assistants and search summaries answer from your data without sending the visitor. Sites earn nothing from being right, while simultaneously paying bandwidth for the bots that harvest them. Small data publishers — the ones whose numbers everyone quotes — die first.
What's the community saying?
HN 303 points, 132 comments
- Survivors swap defenses: Cloudflare bot rules, static-site rewrites, and the exact robots.txt stanzas to block ClaudeBot, GPTBot and friends.
- A darker theory from Reddit gets debated: deliberate degradation to push users to paid products — most commenters think simple exhaustion is likelier.
- The bigger worry, repeatedly: every niche dataset the web relies on has this failure mode, and the AI companies quoting the data aren't paying for its upkeep.