Website Builder Squarespace Scrapes Your Websites For AI Training And You Can't Stop It

If you have even a slight interest in YouTube, chances are you're already aware that most of the sponsored products promoted by your favorite creators aren't quite what they appear, with their offenses ranging from misleading advertising to outright scams.

By this point, it's common knowledge that the acclaimed Kamikoto knives are mediocre at best, Established Titles won't truly grant you the title of Lord, and Raid: Shadow Legends isn't actually a AAAA Game of the Century. Recently, however, another company frequently advertised on YouTube has found itself a subject of controversy, with that being everyone's favorite website builder, Squarespace.

A couple of weeks ago, Ed Newton-Rex, a former VP of Audio at Stability AI and advocate for fair AI training, who previously discovered that music generator Suno was likely trained on copyrighted materials, took to Twitter to notify his followers that Squarespace has an option to allow data crawlers to utilize content from users' websites for AI training. This feature, which in and of itself is no bueno, is made ten times worse by being turned on by default.

While it was by no means a recent addition, having been brought to attention by Twitter user CindyLouWho_2 as far back as November 2023, Ed's post still came as a revelation to a significant number of individuals, who prior to that were completely unaware that data from their Squarespace-built websites was being scraped to train generative models.

Following his initial findings, Ed reached out to Squarespace directly to learn more about the data scraping option, but unfortunately, his discoveries weren't reassuring.

According to the author's latest publication, not only are you enrolled to permit AI data crawlers by default, but opting out is also quite limited, with the option only excluding you from 5 data crawlers out of who knows how many. Crawlers from other companies, such as Amazon, ByteDance, Facebook, and many others are still scraping your content even if you attempt to disallow it.

Moreover, there's no way to manually update your robots.txt file to block more crawlers, presumably due to agreements between Squarespace and major tech companies permitting them to scrape the websites of Squarespace users even if those users aren't OK with that. "The bottom line: none of the estimated ~3 million live Squarespace websites can meaningfully opt out of being scraped for training data by AI companies," Ed noted.

So, if you're a Squarespace user concerned about your website being scraped, it appears your choices are quite limited. Share your thoughts in the comments below and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.