AI is answering users’ questions with content it scraped from your website, often without any intention of crediting you or sending its users your way. Should that bother you?
Does it matter if AI uses your content?
That depends entirely on your content’s purpose in the first place.
If you published content to inform or influence, AI might be helping you do that better than you could ever do yourself.
If you published a position paper, an explainer, a guide, a speech, an opinion piece for the primary purpose of changing what people think or how they behave, then getting your idea in front of people is more important than getting the credit for saying it.
In this case, AI is probably your greatest influence multiplier since the rise of mass media.
If you published content to convert leads or sales, the picture is very different.
In this case, your content is working for you only if you are named or linked, and you often won’t be, unless you need to be to answer the question.
For example: AI might use content from your service pages to answer a generic question about your service, but only mention you if your service and location pages make you relevant to a more direct “recommend near me” request.
Getting mentioned in the response to a direct request for a recommendation is a win (and why you want AI to use your content), but being used to help answer the generic question without attribution isn’t.
You can’t control attribution; it’s a courtesy, extended when it suits AI.
But the real risk isn’t that your content is used without credit; it’s being left out of a response naming a competitor.
Do we need to change how we think about content?
Absolutely.
We shouldn’t be worrying about the traffic we’re losing; we should be thinking about what to publish that achieves our goals when used by AI:
- If you want to inform and influence people, you need to create informative and persuasive content designed to lifted by AI.
- If you want leads and referrals, you need to help AI help you. You need useful and specific information for AI to confidently know when, what, and how to recommend you to its users.
You can win hearts and minds without ever being named.
But if you need referrals, you can’t win them without being named. Ask an AI assistant to recommend someone who does what you do. If it doesn’t name you, that’s not a traffic problem; it’s a content problem.
If you need help shaping your content so AI will lift to win hearts and minds, or recommend you to users, get in touch.
