AI Thoughts

Cloudflare has introduced a new solution called Pay Per Crawl, billed as a “third option” for content owners to leverage in the new AI world. The blog post highlights that publishers had only two options: “all open” or “walled garden.” CloudFlare’s new Pay‑Per‑Crawl feature allows it to charge AI crawlers per request. Using HTTP 402 and secure authentication, […]

Early last week, Meta was granted partial summary judgment in a copyright lawsuit, with the court concluding that the plaintiffs failed to present evidence of a functioning licensing market disrupted by Meta’s use of their books for AI training. But the ruling wasn’t just about what evidence was missing—it highlighted a more profound issue: the

Across the broader search community and specifically at SMX Advanced last week, the phrase “Delphic costs ” was mentioned multiple times. But while many are referencing it, few outside of those speakers seem to grasp the strategic implications of this emerging concept fully. Delphic costs refer to the hidden costs incurred when users are shielded from suboptimal options

AI-powered search engines don’t just find answers—they shape them. Google SGE, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity summarize and synthesize what they determine to be the best answer, often by collapsing multiple viewpoints into a single “consensus.” The more frequently an idea appears across authoritative sources, the more likely it is to be cited. But what

Understanding layered intent is the key to staying visible in an AI-first search world. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for a VP of Answers and described how AI systems are reshaping what it means to be “the best” in search. It was sparked by a real-life moment: I was researching the