Ashley Clayton is the Architect of Measurable Marketing Ecosystems™ and Founder of Iterateology — helping coaches, consultants, and done-for-you providers build measurement strategies that reflect how their business actually works, not just what the platforms make easy to count. With 15+ years across tech, marketing, and analytics, she created the Measurable Marketing Ecosystem™ framework to give service providers the upstream thinking they need before touching a single dashboard. She is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and certified business coach.
Did you consent to AI training on your content?
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Hi, Reader! I hadn't. And I didn't realize it until a cold email I almost ignored sent me down a rabbit hole I hadn't planned on going down. The email was pitching a "partnership" — vague enough to be suspicious, specific enough to make me go looking. What I found made me realize my content had likely been harvested to train AI models without my knowledge and without any expectation of being cited as a source. The thing is, I hadn't blocked anything initially, not because I didn't care, but because I thought the choice was block AI bots and lose visibility in AI-assisted search, or let them crawl and accept whatever they did with it. (Spoiler, I'd chosen the latter.) That's not really consent, in fact, it's not really a choice at all — not when AI search is now a legitimate visibility channel for your business. So I kept digging. Turns out the tradeoff I'd been living under doesn't actually exist — training crawlers and search crawlers are two completely separate systems. You can block one without touching the other. I'm probably not the only one who didn't know that. So I wrote up the full walkthrough. 👉 How to Block AI Training Bots on Your Website, Without Losing Search Visibility There's a skip-link if you'd rather go directly to the practical steps and skip past the background.
P.S. This one started with a cold email and ended with me calling out my own bias on AI image generation versus written work. Wasn't planning on that part. That's how rabbit holes work. Click here to read the post!
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Iterateology
Ashley Clayton is the Architect of Measurable Marketing Ecosystems™ and Founder of Iterateology — helping coaches, consultants, and done-for-you providers build measurement strategies that reflect how their business actually works, not just what the platforms make easy to count. With 15+ years across tech, marketing, and analytics, she created the Measurable Marketing Ecosystem™ framework to give service providers the upstream thinking they need before touching a single dashboard. She is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and certified business coach.
Hi, Reader!If your feed looked like mine last week, you saw some version of "Claude is watermarking its text now," followed by a lot of speculation, a round of "I told you so" from folks who've been wary of AI all along, an equal round of "But the ideas are mine!" from the other direction, and a few people announcing they were switching tools. Keep in mind that social is always going to amplify the extremes on both sides in any situation. That's what gets engagement and keeps eyeballs on...
Hi, Reader!If I asked you right now where your last five to ten leads came from, what would you actually say? (Seriously, reply and let me know) For most service providers, it's some version of "I think Instagram," "maybe it was a referral," or "someone probably saw my newsletter." That's not tracking you can trust — it's a hedged bet you're staking your business on, masquerading as an answer. My latest video is about closing that gap. It walks through UTM parameters — the small tags you add...
Hi, Reader!I'm on in a few hours. The AI Operator panel goes live today, Thursday, at 12pm EDT, and this will be my last check-in for this round. (I've got some other events lined up, more news on that soon!) If you're registered for Closed Door Talks, the earlier panels are already sitting in your private podcast feed, free through August 31. Worth a look if any of these names ring a bell: Monday's Flops Panel - Sage Grayson, Jen Liddy, Braden Drake, Rosemary Dede, Theresa Heath-Wareing,...