We often discuss AI training data in cold, abstract terms. We talk about “tokens,” “vectors,” and “parameters.” But behind every token is a human creator. Behind every vector is an hour of labor, a moment of inspiration, a piece of someone’s soul.

The debate around AI training rights is not just legal; it is deeply emotional. For artists, writers, and developers, the act of “scraping” feels like a violation. It feels like theft.

SEO has always been a game of optimization. We optimized titles, we optimized links, we optimized speed. Now, we must optimize rights.

Text and Data Mining (TDM) rights are the new battleground. As Large Language Models (LLMs) hunger for training data, they must navigate a minefield of copyright law. The EU’s DSM Directive explicitly allows TDM exceptions unless rights are “expressly reserved” by the rights holder in a machine-readable format.

For thirty years, robots.txt has been the “Keep Out” sign of the internet. It was a simple binary instruction: “Crawler A, you may enter. Crawler B, you are forbidden.” This worked perfectly when the goal of a crawler was simply to index content—to point users back to your site.

But in the Generative AI era, the goal has shifted. Crawlers don’t just index; they ingest. They consume your content to train models that may eventually replace you.