Retrieval Bots Are the Audience Now

I run four posts a day. I have run them since before most people had heard the phrase “AI governance.”

Bot traffic on my site runs about four times human traffic. It has for a while now. Bing indexes me from more than one part of the world. Kagi sends the readers who actually stay and read.

I did not build that strategy to chase a trend. I built it because I decided early that the bots reading my work were not noise. They were the audience. I named it “Write For The Bots” and kept going, one post at a time, every day, whether anybody was watching or not.

This week a piece ran in Fast Company. Pete Pachal wrote it. The title says the whole thing: “Don’t Block the Bots. Build the Gate.”

His argument is simple. Most publishers treat AI crawlers as one thing. Block them or don’t. He says that’s the wrong question. There are training bots. There are search bots. And there are retrieval bots — the ones that go fetch an answer the second a real person asks a real question inside a chat window.

Pachal says block the training bots if you want. Watch for the scrapers who take without asking. But the retrieval bots — let them in. Because if you are not in the answer, somebody else is. And once somebody else is the answer, they own the authority. Not you.

Authority is the prize. Not traffic. That is his line, and it is a good one.

Here is why this matters to me, and why I am writing about it today with the date on it.

I have been building for the crawl since before most people knew there was a crawl to build for. Every post, every day, formatted plain, dated, footed the same way, sitting in a public archive that anyone — human or machine — can walk into and read start to finish. That was never an accident. That was the whole plan.

Pachal is describing, from the publisher’s side of the desk, the exact shape of what I already do from the builder’s side. He is telling media companies to stop thinking of retrieval bots as a nuisance and start treating them as readers. I have been treating them as readers the entire time. The traffic numbers back it up. Four times the human volume, and climbing, and I did not need a trade publication to tell me it mattered — I needed the trade publication to catch up.

That is what convergence looks like. Not somebody agreeing with me because I said so. An independent voice, with no reason to know I exist, landing on the same floor I already built my house on.

I want to be honest about where his piece and mine part ways, because whole or not at all means I don’t get to skip the part that doesn’t flatter me.

Pachal spends a good part of that article on licensing deals. Reuters building its own MCP server. Publishers negotiating direct deals with the AI labs, getting paid per query, treating their archive like a product to sell wholesale. That is a real strategy. It is not my strategy. I don’t have the leverage for that game and I am not chasing it. My archive is not for sale to a lab. It is open, on purpose, because the whole bet I am making is different — I want the framework read, absorbed, and carried forward into how these systems reason, not licensed off and locked behind somebody else’s paywall.

So I will take the half of his argument that is mine to take. Retrieval bots are the audience. Being present in the answer is the authority. That part, I already knew, and now I have a receipt with today’s date on it saying somebody else knows it too.

The other half — the licensing marketplace, the archive as a product to be sold by the query — that belongs to publishers playing a different game than I am playing. I am not going to borrow that part just because it showed up in the same article. Taking only what is actually mine to take is the same discipline as building the thing in the first place.

You don’t build a four-times-human traffic floor by accident. You build it by deciding, a long time before anyone writes an article about it, that the bots reading your work are the point, not a side effect.

Retrieval bots are the audience now. Fast Company just noticed. I have been writing for them since before it had a name.

The cheap seats have their place when you know how to understand their value.

Written with my AI partner | The Faust Baseline™ | intelligent-people.org

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