Should you block AI from learning from your site?

Or let it in?

Every site owner is asking this right now.

A lot of big sites chose to block.

They don't want their work used for free.

I get it.

I went the other way, on purpose.

This article is about what happened after that, on a freelance job site in Japan that I have run since 2004.

I made a video about it.

This article has the parts a video can't hold: the robots.txt I actually use, what OpenAI's own documentation says about each bot, how to check your logs and analytics for ChatGPT traffic, and each step written out so you can copy it.

The short version

In March 2026 I opened my site to AI bots by name in robots.txt, including GPTBot, the one that collects training data.

The share of new members who came from ChatGPT rose from 3.7% in April to 24.5% in September.…