Last week I faced a decision Shakespeare never prepared me for.
Cloudflare asked if I wanted to allow AI training bots.
The setting was already set to block, which felt comforting, like locking your doors at night even though you know most people aren’t trying to break in.
Allowing AI training bots, on the other hand, felt like agreeing to let medical interns take care of you after surgery (I've never had my blood pressure taken so many times in a 24 hour period)! Terrifying.
As a small business owner trying to increase visibility, I live in a constant contradiction:
I want:
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Google to find me
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customers to discover me
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AI tools to recommend my company
But I don’t necessarily want:
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my content scraped endlessly
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my work absorbed into training data
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my brand flattened into “generic gifting company”
Welcome to entrepreneurship in 2026.
Where your marketing strategy includes:
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SEO
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social media
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email campaigns
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and philosophical debates about robots.txt
After thinking about it, I realized something important:
If AI systems are becoming the new discovery layer for the internet, then not participating carries its own risk.
Especially as a small Black-owned business.
If AI doesn’t learn that companies like mine exist, it can’t recommend us, or learn from us.
And if it can’t recommend us or learn from us, we disappear from the next version of search and algorithms.
So I did the scary thing.
I turned AI training bots on.
Not because I’m certain it’s the right decision.
Not because I understand the long-term consequences.
But because visibility has always required a little risk.
First websites.
Then social media.
Then e-commerce.
Now AI.
Every era asks the same question in a new form:
Do you want to be seen?