Last week I found out my content was being stolen to feed AI

Last week I was putting together a client case study collection, and I noticed a friend's blog had been scraped by some AI company and used to train their model. I checked my own site — articles I wrote three years ago are showing up in some AI training dataset.

I had no idea this was happening.

There's a simple fix: hang a "no" sign on your page

It's called NoAI — basically one line of HTML code (HTML is the skeleton language of web pages; you don't need to know how to code):

<meta name="robots" content="noai">

Drop it in your page's section, alongside the "page description" meta tags.

It's like shouting at every crawler (a crawler is a program that auto-grabs web pages): "Don't use this to train AI."

Who's using it? The folks at the New York Public Library (librarian.net); veteran indie blogger Cory Doctorow has been using it for a while; and 200+ people were discussing it on Hacker News recently.

Honest truth: this isn't law — it's a "declaration." OpenAI and Anthropic partly honor it. Smaller companies? Not always.

You can do this today: $0, 5 minutes, copy-paste

Money: $0. One line of code, free.

Time: 5 minutes.

Technical barrier: copy-paste one line.

First step: open your site backend, find "custom code" or "head tags" option (WordPress users: it's under "Theme Editor"; Notion users — you can't add it directly yet, ask a tech friend to help). Paste the line in.

Advice for three stages

Just starting out (under 100 followers): don't rush. Your scraper hit rate is low — wait until you have steady output, then add it.

If you already have 1-2 clients: I'd add it right away. Your client case studies are your most valuable content. If AI learns them, others get to use your success playbook for free.

Scaling up: beyond NoAI, I'd ask an SEO-savvy friend to add restrictions in robots.txt (robots.txt is a file in your site's root directory that tells search engines what not to crawl). Half an hour, done.

One last thing: adding this line won't 100% stop scrapers, but at least you've made a statement — like putting up a "No Smoking" sign at your door. Some people will listen, some won't. But if you don't post one and your stuff gets scraped, you won't even have standing to say "I never agreed."