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Analyzing 5,818 Publishers’ robots.txt Files: Most Non-profit News Organizations Allow AI Bots, OpenAI Most Commonly Blocked
Robots.txt is a common code format that allows website owners to instruct and direct crawlers, scrapers, spiders, and other automated systems that identify themselves as a unique user agent. Once used to green or red light search engines from accessing a site’s content, publishers are now relying on robots.txt for something completely new: Managing web…
Classic bottlenecks are unhelpfully obscured by fast hardware
Sometimes here at Alley and Lede we half wish that our servers would strain under pressure like they used to. As we’ve written previously, hardware performance improvement has outpaced the demands of even the largest news websites over the past decade. Add in software improvements, especially in databases, where columnar storage systems have supplanted a…
Chose your glue carefully
A growing imperative for media companies of all sizes is to directly manage first-party audience data so they can own the customer journey, so selecting the right providers for performance, value, and flexibility is top of mind.
Web Scale is People
Alley has been in business for more than 15 years now, many lifetimes ago in the fast-paced world of web technology and the evolution of the media industry. Some of the challenges in scaling digital platforms we faced back then have become table stakes for any website in 2025. As the industry has evolved and…
Technical Debt is Easier to Create but as Expensive as Ever
Technical debt is one of the most apt metaphors in software development. It’s so apt, in fact, that it might deserve an accounting system of its own. The widespread use of AI coding tools has made technical debt cheaper than ever to accrue, but skills gaps and a lack of awareness could make it harder…
How to Keep Your Organization’s Content Discoverable in the Age of AI Search
How people find information, including your site’s content, is changing—fast. AI search tools like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity AI’s Deep Research, and Grok DeepSearch are redefining the way we search, summarize, and discover content. Being a “power searcher” used to mean knowing your Boolean operators. Now, it means knowing how to ask an AI to…
How to Build a Strategic Planning Roadmap and Revamp Your Website
Does this sound familiar? You are in a deadline-focused organization and the work to maintain and improve your website is ruled by the tyranny of the urgent. You’re constantly in reactive mode, responding to bugs, maintenance issues, and urgent feature requests. As a result, seizing opportunities to build greater value into your website go unexplored…
Avoid the Social Media Shell Game by Prioritizing Your Newsletter Strategy
Attempting to build and maintain your audience as a digital publisher is like trying to walk on unstable ground. You rely on social media and search to drive users to your website, but the status of these platforms is constantly evolving. From ownership changes to black-box algorithms and the changing tastes of users, every platform…
Why is Protecting Accessibility So Hard for News Media Organizations?
The challenges faced by news outlets and their teams are well documented: vanishing print subscriptions, limited ad revenue, the domineering whims of search and social media, and doing more reporting with fewer resources. Maybe these are all too real for you and your organization. But one topic rarely explored is the connection between these challenges…
