INTERVIEW ‘‘
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
... you’ve got bots that are just trying to grab all your content to train a model, and you’ve got bots that are grabbing specific content to meet an individual’s needs. But if the individual is also deploying crawlers there isn’t any way to distinguish them. – John Sheridan
Negotiating a ceasefire with the bots
John Sheridan, Chief Digital Information Officer at The National Archives, discusses how he’s hoping to break out of the AI bot siege by letting down the defences.
PUBLISHERS of rich information sources are fending off ever increasing swarms of AI bots. John Sheridan, Chief Digital Informa- tion Officer at The National Archives (TNA), says one of its most used products, legislation.
gov.uk is now running at one billion requests a month. “It was always a very heavily used public service anyway, but the increased level of bot consumption over the last two years is massive and a real headache. This is the experience for anyone who is publishing significant bodies of content on the web.” Blocking the bots is the tactic many institutions use at the moment, but other, potentially better options are emerging.
Blocking problem
“We’re all in this blocking arms race now. We are having to do this ourselves, putting in rate limit- ing rules or increasingly sophisticated bot control measures. And then the people running the bots are coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of trying to work around it. But just blocking it is really a short-term thing that you do.”
For publishers like The National Archives – paid for and used by the public – bot blocking is increas- ingly problematic. “There an awful lot of ‘bad bots’ but a significant amount of bot activity is probably coming from legitimate sources.”
He said: “The things that you want to support, good bots, and things that are irresponsible and the things that are designed to be harmful are all bun- dled together. You cannot easily distinguish between a denial of service attack against your service from
24 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
someone who wants your content for legitimate reasons. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks have been a phenomenon on the web for a long time. In the past if you had a very large number of requests that had a similar character you’d go ‘there’s no earthly, legit- imate reason why someone would be making those requests’. But that was the old world. The new world is that a large body of requests of similar character might be someone harvesting the content for AI. The motivations are very different but the effects are indistinguishable.”
Relentless helper
John said that using ChatGPT or Claude to carry out research, the AI might make hundreds of requests to the National Archives website, searching the
August-September 2026
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