I was musing the modern web strategist’s dilemma of block the bot or play the game.

It’s the quandry that as authors of content and authorative sources move ever further to fastidiously optimise their content for the age of LLMs, they simultaneously lose human traffic to the AI bots.

You’re chasing the clicks, to please the people not the bots, or are you?

Do we as custodians of websites, known no less as webmasters in another age, pay homage to the Deus ex Machina and welcome their rapacious hunger to crawl our content and revel in their bypass in the hope our brand is cited in their boldy confident assertions to people habitually querying AI chatbots ever more disillusioned by traditional search?

Or do we block the AI bots by our judicious use of robots.txt, pursue the people and champion ever precious human interactions above all else?

I won’t waste energy at this point to argue if it’s AIO or GEO or if in reality, it remains SEO at it’s purest. (Spoiler: it’s SEO)

Two albums, that I am a proud vinyl owner of, spring to mind.

And that of the other band, Queen, that also shaped my youth.

The album’s inner sleeve gatefold was, err, of a different era: #NSFW ?

These days, what stands out most about the album Jazz are the lyrics from the track I named this blog post after.

With that, I’ll leave you to reflect on those lyrics through the lens of a web admin strategist facing the AI dilemma.