OpenAI has disabled the Browse with Bing feature in ChatGPT to prevent users from bypassing paywalls and accessing website information without making a subscription first.
OpenAI has disabled the Browse with Bing feature in ChatGPT to prevent users from bypassing paywalls and accessing website information without making a subscription first.
I’m wondering why websites keep using fake paywalls when they can use a real one where the content isn’t available until user verification.
They do that to let search engines index their articles. Then they switch on the paywall an hour later or so but still get a lot of traffic (which is good for advertising) when people click on the link on Google etc.
The crawler identifies itself as a “robot” which can get past the paywall. When you browse using Chrome the site behaves differently. That’s why it’s so easy to get past by pasting the link into archive.ph
Or by using a browser addon that changes the way the browser identifies itself to pretend it’s a search engine crawler.
They’d like to allow search engines and block (non-paying) visitors, but they took a lazy approach to it.
The correct approach would indeed be to identify paying visitors (user+password) and search engines correctly (secret key), then they can reliably shut down everyone else.
But that would require Google to cooperate and I suspect they don’t want to set a precedent where they let a website dictate how they get content. They like to deal from an all or nothing position.
Of course there are other methods, such as making public just enough about the article to be relevant in searches, but I don’t know why they don’t do that. Probably lowers their SEO effectiveness if I were to guess.
SEO
America’s Test Kitchen used to substitute their article text with a bunch of Lorem Ipsum, but I can’t tell whether they are still doing it without a laptop in front of me.