Your Site Has a Say in the AI Era..Are You Using It?
Demand Dezign Best Practices For Your Site | by JOSHUA MUSUMBA
The Invisible Leak: Is AI Cannibalizing Your B2B Demand?
If your organic traffic has dipped or those "high-intent" blog posts aren't converting like they used to,.. you aren’t imagining things.
You’re witnessing the AI Tax in real-time.
The rise of AI-generated answers (like Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity) has fundamentally changed how B2B buyers consume information. These bots are pulling your frameworks, your insights, and your hard-earned expertise to answer questions directly on the search page often without ever sending the user to your site.
JOSHUA Musumba views this not just as an SEO problem, but as a Demand Design problem. If you aren't managing how bots access your site, you are essentially providing free fuel for your competitors' AI models.
The "Open Door" Policy You Didn't Know You Had
Most B2B service websites are currently operating with an "all-access pass" for scrapers. According to data from Cloudflare, fewer than 40% of top websites have a `robots.txt` file that addresses AI bots.
For a B2B service business, this is a strategic error. Here is why:
Zero-Click Reality: Your practical guides and "how-to" content are being summarized by AI. The user gets the value; you get in attribution.
The One-Way Pipe: Bots like GPTBot (which accounts for nearly 30% of AI bot activity) crawl thousands of pages but refer almost no one back to the source.
Loss of Authority: If an AI can give away your "secret sauce" for free, why would a prospect book a discovery call?
Protecting the Asset: The Strategic Use of Robots.txt
A `robots.txt` file is your digital "house rules." While it won't stop every rogue scraper, legitimate players like OpenAI and Google respect it.
As a demand strategist, Joshua Musumba helps brands move from "passive victim" to "strategic gatekeeper." This involves choosing which bots to welcome and which to block:
| Bot Name | Owner | Purpose | Strategic Move |
| Googlebot | Traditional Search Indexing | Allow (Stay visible in search) | |
| Google-Extended | Training AI Models (Gemini) | Disallow (Keep your IP out of the model) | |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Training ChatGPT | Disallow (Protect original frameworks) |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Training Claude | Disallow (Prevent uncredited summaries) |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | AI Search/Citations | Case-by-Case (They often provide links) |
Demand Design: Beyond Just "Blocking Bots"
Blocking a bot is a tactical fix. The real strategy lies in Demand Design.
In an era where AI can summarize "how-to" content, B2B service businesses must pivot. Joshua focuses on creating "uncannibalizable" content:
1. Proprietary Data: Content based on your own internal data that AI can't replicate.
2. Opinionated Strategy: High-conviction takes that require human nuance.
3. The "Human" Moat: Moving beyond top-of-funnel information and into deep-funnel relationship building.
> The Goal:You don't want to lock your site in a vault. You want to signal to the right bots that your content is for humans to read, not for machines to digest and redistribute.
What Should You Do Next?
The AI era doesn’t mean giving up control; it means being more intentional about your digital boundaries. If you are investing in original thought leadership to drive B2B leads, you need to protect that investment.
1. The Audit: Check [yourdomain.com/robots.txt](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt). If it’s blank or 404s, you are wide open.
2. The Policy: Decide which AI models you’re okay with "teaching" and which ones are simply stealing your traffic.
3. The Pivot: Refocus your content strategy on high-authority design that AI can’t easily mirror.
Joshua works with B2B brands that play the long game. Ensuring your best thinking actually builds your brand, not someone else's LLM.
Book A Clarity Call