WE CHECKED 56 OF AMERICA'S BIGGEST BRANDS: NEWSROOMS LOCK AI OUT, EVERYONE ELSE LEAVES THE DOOR OPEN

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

68% of major US brands have no AI-specific crawling rules. Newsrooms are more likely to block AI bots, with 75% restricting at least one compared with 6% of other brands. None of the 52 accessible robots.txt files fully blocked OpenAI's or Anthropic's AI search bots by name, though some blocked training crawlers. Forbes blocks training bots while allowing AI search, while GEICO explicitly allows all 12 AI crawlers it names.