BoSacks Speaks Out: The Bots Are Winning, Publishers Are Letting Them

This is a deep, complex area that’s far above my pay grade. To my core, I’m a nuts-and-bolts production guy. True mechanics I understand, paper, ink, schedules, logistics. Deep-dive bot secrets? Not my area of expertise. But I read enough and know enough to see the problems, even if I don’t have all the solutions. And I write this anyway because I think it’s important.

We’re living in a paradox so rich it could headline its own satire column. Publishers preach the sanctity of intellectual property, sacred, inviolable, the cornerstone of civilization, and then leave the vault door wide open with a sticky note that says “Please don’t steal.” AI crawlers, ever the polite burglars, nod, smile, and proceed to harvest with industrial efficiency. Meanwhile, most of the industry is too busy polishing its mission statement to notice the barn’s been emptied.

According to recent bot security reporting, nearly 70% of media sites can’t detect basic bots. Fewer than 2% can stop the sophisticated ones. That’s not a nuisance, it’s an operational faceplant. These aren’t pranksters with scripts. These are synthetic browsers that mimic human behavior, bypass CAPTCHAs, and adapt in real time. They don’t just scrape headlines, they slip through login pages, probe checkout flows, and leave compliance risk like confetti at a parade.

Let’s be blunt. Large language models and their handlers aren’t window-shopping. They’re scraping, training, repackaging, and redistributing. Your words come back to compete with you in search rankings. Your forms get probed by invisible fingers. Your brand equity gets diluted like cheap whiskey at a wedding open bar.

So why the inertia? Strategy, fear, and habit. Publishers want to protect content, but they also want discovery, partnerships, and search visibility. That tension breeds paralysis. Add a layer of misplaced nostalgia for legacy bot tools, those charming relics built for yesterday’s bull-in-a-china-shop attacks. Today’s adversaries do yoga. They rotate identities, emulate devices, and mimic human patterns with the patience of a DMV clerk on decaf. They don’t knock at the front door; they come through the plumbing and leave the sink running.

And here’s the kicker: we still treat bot defense like an optional upgrade. Security isn’t a checkbox, it’s infrastructure. It requires behavioral baselines, live tuning, and continuous regression tests. If your vendor hands you a glossy dashboard while detection rates hover in the single digits, congratulations, you’ve bought theater tickets, not locks. If your team reviews bot rules once a quarter, you’re not running a newsroom; you’re curating a museum exhibit titled “How We Got Scraped.”

Other industries get it. Travel sees bots as revenue siphons and ties detection to inventory. Gambling treats automation as fraud and instruments every session. Real estate knows listing spam kills trust and enforces relentlessly. They iterate. They measure. They staff the problem. Media, meanwhile, is still asking if robots.txt counts as a restraining order.

Publishers love to talk about their duty to readers. Good. Protecting the reading ecosystem now includes protecting the pipes. The bot beneath the bed isn’t a children’s story. It’s an economic actor with a very good mask. Treat it accordingly.

We’ve spent years polishing headlines and leaving the back door open. Close the door. Write the contract. Make security part of the product, not the prayer. The bots will keep evolving; so must we.