💸 Your Content = Free AI Training

📥 Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!

We kept the momentum going with a mix of innovation and infrastructure improvements.

⚙️ Continued enhancing PPWP Pro’s builder compatibility and auto-unprotect scheduling feature.
🪄 Tested PDA Magic Link updates and investigated .webp file compatibility with EWWW Image Optimizer.
📁 Released new builds for the VRP and Video Recorder plugins.
💬 Reviewed and improved server configurations, updated plugins, and confirmed Stripe renewal workflows.

Week 3 focused on deeper product refinement and backend performance.

AI bot traffic surged 225 percent in 2025, according to Akamai. While The New York Times and Ziff Davis sue AI platforms for scraping their content, individual creators face the same threat—but with fewer defenses.

The economics are brutal: Enterprise bot-blocking solutions cost tens of thousands annually. Lawsuits require hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works to justify the legal fees. Individual creators have valid claims but lack the budget to fight.

Yet food blogger Sarah Leung and recipe creator Gina Homolka aren't waiting for legal precedent. They're using WordPress plugins and standardized terms of service to block AI scrapers—and protecting the content that drives their revenue.

When AI platforms scrape your recipes, tutorials, or course content without permission, they're not just stealing intellectual property. They're training models to answer questions your website used to answer—intercepting the search traffic that feeds your business.

Leung runs The Woks of Life, a YouTube channel and recipe website. Her business model depends on owned traffic, not platform algorithms. When AI bots scrape her recipes to train language models, those models can reproduce her content in chat interfaces—cutting her out entirely.

"When people think of publishers, they think of those big, traditional media publishers — but there are many smaller publishers, like ourselves," Leung told Digiday.

The distinction matters. Creators who built businesses on owned websites face the same IP threats as traditional publishers. But the tools available to defend their content aren't equal.

Robots.txt is essentially an honor system that AI crawlers ignore. IP lawyer Jesse Saivar puts it plainly: creators have valid claims, but they don't have the money to fight them, and they're not looking at publisher-level damages.

Instead, creators need technical solutions. Raptive, a media company working with food bloggers and lifestyle creators, developed a WordPress plugin that blocks AI bot traffic. They also standardized "Creator Terms of Content Use"—legal language explicitly prohibiting scraping.

The concern was obvious: would blocking bots tank search rankings?

Raptive ran a study from May 2024 to June 2025 measuring the traffic impact. Blocking one or more AI bots didn't lead to significant traffic decreases. In some cases, creators who blocked Google-Extended showed up more often in search results than those who didn't.

"Right now, I don't think any creator can completely stop AI from scraping, but I am taking steps to protect my work where I can," said Homolka, who runs Skinnytaste.

Traditional publishers pay for enterprise-level bot detection from companies like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai. These solutions cost thousands monthly, with annual subscriptions running in the tens of thousands.

Akamai doesn't offer its bot-blocking products to individual creators at all. They focus on traditional publishers who can afford enterprise pricing.

David Senecal, Akamai's director of engineering for fraud and abuse, notes that freemium bot-management products exist for individual publishers—but effectiveness depends on scraper aggression.

That's the vulnerability: creators need protection but can't access the same tools as publishers. Free WordPress plugins work against standard bots. Aggressive scrapers require expensive solutions most creators can't justify.

If your business depends on owned content—recipes, tutorials, course materials, member resources—you're in the crosshairs. AI platforms don't distinguish between The New York Times and your WordPress site. They scrape what's valuable.

The monetization implications are direct:

Raptive's standardized terms and WordPress plugin offer a starting point. They're free, they don't hurt rankings, and they establish legal boundaries around content use.

But the fundamental problem remains: creators face publisher-level threats with consumer-level tools. The companies making billions training AI on scraped content aren't paying licensing fees. The honor system failed. Enterprise solutions cost more than most creator businesses generate.

Until legal precedent forces licensing agreements—or until accessible technical solutions match the sophistication of AI scrapers—individual creators are implementing partial defenses against a systematic problem.

The alternative is watching AI platforms monetize your content while your search traffic disappears.

42% of creators would lose $50K+ if their primary platform disappeared

Nearly half of all creators have built businesses that would collapse if one platform changed policies. These aren't hobbyists—$50K+ represents real income that evaporates the moment a platform adjusts its terms or algorithms.

Platform dependency at this scale isn't a risk management problem. It's proof you built content production, not business operations. Real businesses generate revenue through multiple independent units: talent agencies, live events, IP licensing, product lines. Each functions regardless of what happens on social media. Most creators call platform monetization a "business model" while one policy change away from zero income.