Digital Digging with Henk van Ess

Digital Digging with Henk van Ess

How AI bots quietly dismantle paywalls via web search

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Henk van Ess
Jul 11, 2025
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ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have figured out how to get around paywalls through "live" web search—and they're doing it systematically and quietly across major publications, new Digital Digging research reveals.

This isn't about the well-documented issue of AI companies using paywalled content in training datasets. It's about a different, emerging threa…

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