23 June 2025

The transformation of bots into AI: friend or foe

In summary

• AI is accelerating the capabilities of bots, enabling them to improve efficiency, interact with customers, and deliver results at an unprecedented speed.
• This evolution is having a profound impact on digital marketing and shaping customer experiences—for better and for worse.
• This article kicks off a series exploring the most common types of bots and how they’re being used across the spectrum—from helpful tools to harmful exploits, and everything in between.

What is a bot?

A bot is a software program designed to perform specific tasks automatically, without the need for manual input each time. Bots often mimic or replace human actions, especially for repetitive tasks, and can complete them much faster and more efficiently than a person could.

Common types of bots

Some examples of common types of bots used today are chatbots, web crawlers, social bots, shopping bots and monitoring bots.

This article kicks off a series exploring the most common types of bots and how they’re being used across the spectrum—from helpful tools to harmful exploits, and everything in between.

Let’s look at crawler bots.

Crawler bots and content creation

Google and other search engines have built their business using bots that crawl and index content for the most relevant search results. This process would take humans an impossible amount of time to execute. One the flip side, these same kinds of bots create a massive headache for companies wanting to protect their intellectual property (IP).

Below we will look at some recent examples of how ‘crawler bots’ are powering LLM’s and opening up a barrage of questions over who owns what. There has never been a bigger case than today, when billions of dollars are at stake and the commercialisation of GenAI content is the tip of the iceberg.

Courts flooded with copyright cases as AI sparks legal storm

There are a flood of court cases happening at the moment between big tech AI LLM builders and publishers who are trying to hold onto the foundations of their business models and revenue. 

News Corp is involved in an interesting menage a trois with two of the cases they have going on. Last year, News Corp accused Perplexity of using ‘copyrighted’ works to populate its RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) in order to generate responses to users’ queries. As with all publishers and AI content, the fear here is that this tweaked AI content is effectively replacing the users’ need to visit the actual publisher’s site, and thus diverting revenue from their ad supported business model.

Earlier this year, challenger web browser, Brave, took legal action to counter a cease and desist letter it received from News Corp for the alleged misappropriation of copyrighted articles.  News Corp alleges that Brave is unlawfully scraping ‘copyrighted’ content from its websites to populate Brave’s search results. This is questionable as Brave only started creating their own search results in 2021 and they don’t appear any different to whats already happening out there.

With only 1% of the search market, Brave are fighting back countering “fair use” amid the fact that all search engines do this to operate. Claims of bullying and mutual commercial partnerships with Google are also swirling around this case.

Take a look at Brave’s search results yourself, can you see any significant difference to Google search or other search platforms out there?

Inside the legal battles and what comes next

The interpretation of current law is that as long as AI models ingest data or written copy and do not completely replicate it, then the use of the material is acceptable. The content produced by AI does not hold any copyright. You can read more about possible infringements on this KMPG legal article. 

However, untangling where this starts and ends is the real conundrum as AI starts to source content beyond just the written word. Image creators and photographers are particularly at risk as AI image companies say images on the open web are pretty much a free for all when feeding image generating AI machines. As award winning illustrator Annosha Syed told the Guardian;

“AI doesn’t look at art and create its own, it samples everyone’s and mashes it into something else”

Even more concerning to creators, is that beyond the common general prompts, AI image generators can also be asked to create images based on the work of a known artist, further blurring ethical boundaries.

Nowhere is copyright a more contested and lucrative debate than in the music industry. Just last week it was revealed that P Diddy pays Sting an enormous sum of $2,000 per day after the rapper sampled “Every Breath You Take” without asking permission or agreeing to royalties beforehand. 

With AI Generative Music Platforms popping up, this battleground is destined to fiercely heat up. In 2024 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) launched two copyright infringement suits against AI music firms. As reported by Music Week; 

“The claim is based on the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by Suno and Udio”.

Crawler bots in a marketers world

Long before AI became a buzzword, digital marketers were already well-acquainted with crawler bots, for good and for bad.

Just the other month a Louder client was explaining that they can never effectively offer the lowest market price for their product. This is due to web crawler bots scraping their pricing information and enabling competitors to jump in with identical products and lower prices almost immediately.

Whilst this can be classified as IP theft, it has been going on for so long, no-one bats an eyelid, and marketers continue to scramble, navigating the increasing competition and price wars out there.

On the other side, there’s what’s known as Brand Protect bots. In this case the bot crawler is instructed to scan websites to detect brand misuse, phishing, counterfeits, and impersonation. It helps protect brand integrity by identifying threats early so companies can act quickly to reduce risk.

Other types of brand safety and verification technology use this kind of bot technology to check the content of pages for ‘brand safety’ before allowing an ad to be served in the programmatic eco-system. 

Whilst it is possible to use bot blocking technology to stop the use of crawler bots on your site, the sophistication and diversity of bots means that blocking methods need to constantly evolve to keep up and it remains almost impossible to continuously block every single one. With these practices such a common occurrence, it’s no wonder crawler bot usage has continued to rise with little oversight or consequence.

Big brother vs little brother

As bots evolve into more intelligent, AI-driven systems, the risks grow alongside the benefits.

Governments and tech companies appear loath to hold back. With the arms race for AI development heating up, along with the rewards promised in the future, a front line has been drawn between governments, regulators, businesses and creators.

The big brother little brother scenario is feeling very real today. Despite numerous court cases brought by publishing houses and other creator industries, they are taking years to resolve meaning tech companies leap ahead with impunity.  The first major newspaper to sue OpenAI for copyright was the New York Times.

In March this year (2025), the judge ordered that the case would go forward after two-years of deliberations, a small victory for The New York Times and a number of other publishers who have joined forces to protect the very fabric of their businesses.

However, just last year News Corp struck a deal with Open AI worth US$250M over several years. News Corp will licence journalistic work to feed Open AI LLM’s and answers, which relies on swathes of content and data. The issue here is that whilst Open AI (owned by Microsoft) can afford these huge payments, smaller players can’t. News Corp’s continued lawsuit against Perplexity and Brave signal that deal brokering between the top dogs is happening, and smaller competitors may eventually get pushed out.

Last month Reuters reported that the Head of the US Copyright Office was fired for refusing to comply with Elon Musk’s requests to mine troves of copyrighted information to train AI models. The collaboration of government and big tech is a risk for us all as power and money dictate the pace and direction AI is allowed to take. Open AI, arguably the first of the LLM AI models, started off as a not-for-profit venture, however last year they announced that they are seeking to dismantle this structure and make the company a for-profit benefit corporation. 

The end of the page view economy

For publishers and creators it’s necessary to take a pragmatic view of what the future holds. Continued reliance on Google to send traffic through to your website is unrealistic. Google AI Mode is set to launch in Australia early next year, taking the now familiar AI Overviews to the next level of two-way conversational AI content.

Whilst publishers can commiserate on the ‘stolen’ content, in order to survive they must start to pivot and reduce reliance on Google, a lesson publishers should be familiar with through the twists and turns of native advertising with Facebook. Building and engaging your own audience is crucial for long-term success, with many finding effective results through newsletters, podcasts, apps, loyalty programs, and other creative content strategies.

As new models come to life, so too do new opportunities. Whilst The New York Times dug in its heels with copyright accusations to Open AI, at the end of last month it revealed it had struck a multi-year deal with Amazon to use its editorial content for AI products such as Alexa.

The path forward for many publishers will be to produce information specifically for AI systems to ingest. This means abandoning legacy ad-based models in favour of licensing agreements for AI platforms, essentially feeding LLM’s instead of publishing on the open web. 

Louder’s recommendation

If you are a content provider and already seeing some decline in organic search traffic, come and speak to our consultants and learn about the following solutions:

• AI Max for search
  Last month, Google launched AI Max for Search, expanding on its PMAX and DemandGen solutions. Together, these tools form a multi-touch discovery strategy designed to elevate the performance and reach of your campaigns. 
  Talk to us today about being part of the Beta Program
• Google Discover
  Google Discover is a personalised content feed that surfaces articles, videos, and other content based on a user’s interests, search history, and online behaviour—without requiring them to actively search. 
  Optimising content for Google Discover can help websites tap into a steady stream of organic traffic from highly engaged users.

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