You may have seen posts floating around claiming that if you don’t manually enable AI scraping on platforms like YouTube and Substack, your content will basically get ignored. The gist is that AI models won’t be able to “ingest” your stuff, which means you won’t show up in their answers or recommendations for search.
Sounds scary, right? Well, I dug into this claim, and the reality is more complicated than that viral post suggests.
What’s Actually Happening
First, let’s get the facts straight.
YouTube did roll out an opt-in system back in December 2024 that lets creators decide whether third-party companies can use their videos to train AI models. By default, this access is blocked, so you’d need to actively say “yes” if you want your content used for training.
Substack has similar controls where you can disable AI bots from scraping your published content for training purposes.
So far, so good. That part of the viral claim checks out.
But Here’s Where It Gets Messy…
The whole “you’ll be forgotten” angle? That’s where things get murky.
There’s a huge difference between AI training and being discoverable online.
Even if you opt out of AI training, your content can still show up in search results and AI-powered recommendations. Google, for instance, can still train its search-specific AI products (like those AI Overviews you see at the top of search results) on content across the web, even when publishers have opted out of training Google’s other AI products.
It’s like having two different doors: one for “use my content to train your AI” and another for “show my content in search results.” Closing one doesn’t automatically lock the other.
The Real Catch-22
Here’s the kicker: if you want to completely opt out of having your content used in search AI, you basically have to opt out of being indexed for search entirely. That means choosing between being findable in regular search or being used in AI-generated responses… not exactly a great set of options.
Different AI companies also have completely different policies. What works for blocking one company might not work for another. It’s not the simple, universal toggle switch that some people make it out to be.
Look, I get why this topic freaks people out. But the truth is more nuanced than “findable or forgotten.”
You do have more control over AI training than you might think, especially on platforms like YouTube and Substack. But opting out of AI training doesn’t mean your content vanishes from the internet or becomes impossible to discover.
The landscape is still evolving, and different platforms are handling this stuff in different ways. The internet isn’t going to forget you just because you don’t want your content used to train the next ChatGPT.
But it’s definitely worth understanding what your options are and what trade-offs you’re making. And, stay tuned, things change constantly.
