AI crawler killed a 16-year-old technology blog: the author of 2ality was forced to close the website due to Crawler traffic
2ality.com, the most veteran technical blog in JavaScript, has announced its temporary closure. The author Dr. Axel Rauschmayer admitted frankly: AI crawlers have filled up website traffic, while book sales revenue has dropped from enough to survive in 2024 to zero in 2026. It’s a classic story of how AI companies are destroying independent content creators.
Core conclusion
In May 2026, 2ality.com, the most senior technical blog in the field of JavaScript, announced its temporary closure. The author, Dr. Axel Rauschmayer, posted a statement on the homepage of the website: AI crawlers have filled up bandwidth and book sales have reached zero. He has decided to withdraw his blog and all online free books from the Internet. This is not only a farewell to personal technology blogs, but also a microcosm of the entire ecosystem of independent content creators facing systematic cannibalization by AI companies.
Key Points
- Event time: May 17, 2026 -Affected objects: independent content creators, technology bloggers, information website webmasters
- Core changes: AI crawlers consume bandwidth but do not bring revenue + AI model training causes book sales to zero = content creation economic model goes bankrupt
- Inspiration for practitioners in the field of AI money-making/automation: The pure content traffic model requires a redesign of the business model
Background: 16 years of JavaScript knowledge base
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer is one of the most respected authors in the JavaScript community. His blog 2ality.com has been in operation since 2010 and has published hundreds of in-depth technical articles covering core topics such as JavaScript language specifications, ES6/ES7+ features, and TypeScript best practices. His books, such as JavaScript for Impatient Programmers, are also available as free online readings to developers around the world.
For 16 years, 2ality has been walking on two legs: book sales revenue + blog advertising/affiliate revenue.
But in May 2026, both legs were broken at the same time.
Key impact: How AI is killing independent blogs
| Dimensions | Change | What it means to us | Recommended actions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website bandwidth cost | AI crawlers consume most of the traffic, and bandwidth costs soar | Content sites are facing an unsustainable situation of "generating power with love" | Deploy robots.txt to restrict crawlers + Cloudflare AI crawler blocking |
| Book sales revenue | Drops from "enough to live on" in 2024 to "zero" in 2026 | AI model training reduces demand for original content | Diversified revenue model, not dependent on a single channel |
| Advertising revenue | Traffic brought by AI crawlers cannot be converted into advertising revenue | Pure SEO traffic model is fundamentally challenged | Transformation to affiliate/membership/service model |
| Creator's will | The author "doesn't have any energy to deal with this problem" | High-quality content creators are exiting at an accelerated pace | The community/platform needs to establish a creator protection mechanism |
The scale of the AI bot problem: It’s not just 2ality
What happened to 2ality is not an isolated case. Since 2026, the "rush" of training data from AI companies has triggered a chain reaction:
- Turso shuts down bug bounty program because AI-generated spam submissions overwhelm review system
- arXiv announces that AI hallucination references will be banned for 1 year
- Amazon employees were exposed as being forced to increase their use of AI and started making up tasks as a result
- Feedback from many small and medium-sized blog webmasters: the proportion of AI crawler traffic has soared from 20% in 2025 to 70%+ in 2026
It’s worth noting that Amazonbot finally announced compliance with robots.txt in May 2026, but this was a drop in the bucket of the damage that had been done. 2ality’s closure illustrates that even after the ban was implemented, independent content creators could no longer survive the day when protection mechanisms came into effect.
Inspiration for AI money-making practitioners
1. Affiliate + tool recommendation is more resistant than pure advertising
2ality relies primarily on revenue from book sales + advertising. When AI model training leads to a decline in people's demand for "reading technical books" (because AI can answer directly), book sales will return to zero as an inevitable result.
In contrast, affiliate recommendation (tool SaaS commission) is a model more resistant to the impact of AI:
- AI may recommend tools, but people still have to click on purchase links
- Tool commissions are based on actual usage rather than reading volume
- Recommending tools is more difficult to replace by AI than writing tutorials (requires personal experience and trust accumulation)
2. Traffic ≠ revenue, AI crawler traffic is equal to cost
2ality’s traffic increased, but it was all AI crawlers. This is a fatal blow to any revenue model that relies on CPM/CPC advertising. Be sure to add crawler identification and filtering logic to the automated workflow.
3. Defense checklist for independent website operators
- Block known AI crawlers (GPTBot, Claude-Web, Google-Extended, etc.) in robots.txt
- Use Cloudflare’s AI crawler blocking feature
- Configure Web Application Firewall to rate limit non-human behavior
- The content is added to the members area and is not completely free to the public.
- Core tutorials are in video form (AI is more difficult to capture and understand)
- Establish a mailing list and establish a channel to directly contact readers
Related reading
Tool entry
The following tools appearing in the text will match the maintained tools library on the platform side:
Cloudflare, N8N, DeepSeek, OpenAI
Internal link guidance
- How to build a revenue system that is resistant to the impact of AI through automated content operations? See: How to build an AI content automated distribution system with n8n + ChatGPT: a complete 30-minute tutorial
- Real case: He Built an AI Automation Stack with Claude + n8n — $4K to $12K/mo in 6 Months
Monetization angle
How can you make money from this trend?
WayToClawEarn focuses on verified earn playbooks—not just news. Start from these cases.
n8n + OpenAI affiliate site
Automate content and affiliate monetization
Claude + n8n automation agency
Charge monthly for agent workflow builds