The legacy "Block AI bots" switch is deprecated on 15 September, and mixed-purpose crawlers get folded into it. Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot are in scope. Opting out is one click and the window is 25 days.
Sometime in the last two years a lot of us flipped a switch in Cloudflare called "Block AI bots." It was one click, it was free, it was framed as protecting your content, and there was no reason not to. I did it. I never thought about it again.
When we first built Murror, we stored every journal entry forever. More data meant better emotional pattern detection, smarter insights, richer reflections.
Our AI kept getting better. Our users kept getting quieter.
Play's Age Signals terms limit the signal to age-appropriate experiences and name advertising, marketing, profiling and analytics as prohibited uses, with app takedown as the stated penalty. Apple's version hands you the age plus how it was proven. Both are live now in a widening list of regions, and the default engineering reflex is wrong for both.
There's a new field arriving in mobile apps this year and almost nobody is treating it as a product decision. It's the user's age, handed to you by the store instead of asked for in your onboarding.
For months, we celebrated our power users at Murror the ones journaling every day, sometimes multiple times a day. They had the highest session times, the most entries, the best retention curves. On paper, they were our success story.
Then we started reading what they were actually writing.
Everyone tells you to ship fast. Move fast and break things. Get to market before someone else does.
I believed this for a long time. When we were building Murror, speed was everything. We pushed features weekly, sometimes daily. We celebrated every deploy like a small victory.
Average AI product gross margin is 52% against the 80% that defined SaaS, and inference eats about 23% of revenue. Every growth instinct you inherited was formed in a world where your best user cost you nothing.
There's a rule most of us absorbed without ever being taught it: engagement is free. One more session, one more entry, one more day in the app pure margin. That rule is why "north star metric" articles exist, why every dashboard puts DAU at the top, why nobody ever asked you what your heaviest cohort costs. It held for twenty years because the marginal cost of serving a software user really was approximately zero.
For months, our most requested feature at Murror was a chat function. Users wanted to talk to the AI the way they talk to a friend. It seemed obvious. Every competitor had it. Every feedback form mentioned it.
I ve been working on another product alongside Murror a side project we re experimenting with, built almost entirely through AI. I m not a developer. I can t read most of the codebase. But I shipped a feature that three users have already told me feels exactly right.
Pew measured the click collapsing from 15% to 8% when an AI summary appears. A separate read of 35,000 ChatGPT citations shows where the decision moved to and it's mostly places you don't own.
Start with the one number here that isn't someone's marketing. Pew Research put browsing software on 900 US adults and watched 68,879 real Google searches in March 2025. Not a survey about how search feels. Actual behaviour.
