Brave Sells Its Search Index To AI, And Your Website Is Probably In It via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic

Brave's announcement that it is selling its search index to AI providers Cohere, Mistral, and Perplexity means millions of web pages—including most small‑business sites—are now directly fed into generative‑AI models as source material. For website owners this creates two immediate concerns. First, the content of your pages will be used to train and power AI‑driven answers, potentially surfacing your brand in AI chat responses without any attribution or control. Second, the increased AI traffic can inflate bot visits, skewing analytics and exposing your site to higher crawl rates that may affect server load and SEO rankings. **Actionable steps:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** file to declare whether you permit or block indexing by AI models. Include explicit `allow: true` or `allow: false` directives for Cohere, Mistral, and Perplexity to manage exposure. 2. **Implement granular bot detection** using a tool like llmscentral’s AI‑bot tracker. Flag traffic from the IP ranges associated with these providers and separate it from human visitor data. 3. **Monitor server performance** by setting rate‑limit rules for AI crawlers in your robots.txt or via your web server’s configuration, preventing overload while still allowing legitimate indexing.