What mechanism does a site have for doing that? I don't see anything in robots.txt standard about being able to set priority but I could be missing something.
I mean, that's what's this technology is capable of, right? Especially when one asks it nicely and with emphasis.
This also means that right now, it could be much easier to push through such standard than ever before: there are big players who would actually be receptive to it, so even few not-entirely-selfish actors agreeing on it might just do the trick.
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[0] - Plenty of them exist. Scrapping wasn't popularized by AI companies, it's standard practice of on-line business in competitive markets. It's the digital equivalent of sending your employees to competing stores undercover.
[1] - Not to be confused with having an LLM scrap specific page for some user because the user requested it. That IMO is a totally legitimate and unfairly penalized/villified use case, because LLM is acting for the user - i.e. it becomes a literal user agent, in the same sense that web browser is (this is the meaning behind the name of "User-Agent" header).
We do have evidence, which is their current behavior. If they are happy ignoring robots.txt (and also ignoring copyright law), what gives you the belief that they magically won't ignore this new standard? Sure, it in theory might save them money, but if there's one thing that I think is blatantly obvious it is that money isn't what these companies care about because people just keep turning on the money generator. If they did care about it, they wouldn't be spending far more than they earn, and they wouldn't be creating circular economies to try to justify their existences. If my assertion has no evidence, I don't exactly see how yours does either, especially since we have seen that these companies will do anything if it means getting what they want.
Unless we have some government enforcing the standard, another trust based contract won't do much.
Yes. In this context, the problem is that you cannot trust websites to provide a standardized bulk download options. Most of them have (often pretty selfish or user-abusive) reasons not to provide any bulk download, much less proactively conform to some bottom-up standards. As a result, unless one is only targeting one or few very specific sites, even thinking about making the scrapper support anything but the standard crawling approach costs more in developer time than the benefit it brings.
Or even /.well-known/ai/$PLATFORM.ext which would have the instructions.
Could even be "bootstrapped" from /robots.txt