On 02/06/2026 22:44, Adrian Johnston via Std-Proposals wrote:
> What I am observing is that high quality websites like https://
> en.cppreference.com/ <https://en.cppreference.com/> are blocking AI
> search tools because they don't generate advertising revenue. And so my
> AI (Claude) routinely ends searching for online posts made by people who
> are confused and asking for help and getting terse responses that may be
> incomplete at best.

This is a false premise (and consequence).

Many websites are blocking (AI) crawlers because of the immense traffic
they generate, not because of missing advertising revenue. This includes
lots of "core" C++ projects (e.g. GCC / Sourceware). While the hosted
contents are free, the infrastructure required for hosting isn't. And AI
platforms aren't helping to pay the light bills.

It's also all to be demonstrated that indexing something like
cppreference (which is, indeed, just a _reference_) would improve the
quality of answers. The reference information is available elsewhere,
like in the standard draft, which is hosted on GitHub.

My 2 c,
--
Giuseppe D'Angelo