robots.nxt - New Tools for a New Internet
Taking back control for creators
The internet was built for humans, of humans, by humans.
Websites segment traffic into audiences into revenue funnels into cash flow.
Thanks for reading PaynPoint! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
But now, the largest source of traffic online isn’t humans, it’s automated agents - bots.
There’s more bots than humans, and there always will be. Humans are forever going to be a shrinking part of your audience.
It’s a brave new world out there, and most websites are naked, alone, and afraid.
What are we supposed to do?
Sign up to robots.nxt
Follow the Money Web1 was advertising (Google) and ecommerce (Amazon).
Web2 was software as a service, with B2B defined by Salesforce and B2C by Netflix.
Web3 is crypto and AI… but where is the revenue model?
A websites’ largest audience is bots, but most analytics tools don’t report bots, so most websites can’t see them.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Bots are a million times faster than humans, and a surge of bots will destroy you with server costs. Your largest source of traffic is bots, but you can’t control them.
Your largest cohort to convert is bots, but you can’t monetize them. They not only cost you more, but you get nothing back for it.
More traffic that converts less, forces websites to make more money from a smaller audience, subsidizing more and more non-contributors. And they just keep coming.
Websites are drowning.
We’ve heard from ifixit and Game UI Database, but how many suffer in silence? How many websites are scratching their heads saying, why are we billed for 30k visitors per day when our analytics only shows 15k?
How many websites are wasting half their opex on an audience that doesn’t convert?
Sign up to robots.nxt
Great, You’ve Pinpointed It Most analytics platforms ignore bots, and for good reason - all our monetization methods are for humans. Bots have traditionally been irrelevant to how websites make money, so why report them?
But ignoring bots means ignoring half the traffic to a site - and half the cost!
robots.nxt exposes your bot traffic. Who, what, when, where, and how much they’re costing you.
You want some of those bots coming around, but most of them are a waste. Don’t you want to claw back everything you’re spending on bots that don’t do anything for you?
Sign up to robots.nxt
Step Two is Washing it Off Once you can see all the bots, you can manage them.
Unlike robots.txt, which politely requests things, robots.nxt is active enforcement. If a bot requests something that violates the rules, the website responds to the bot in the way you tell it to - the request may be ignored, it may return something different than the bot requested, or whatever you want it to do. Bots cannot break the rules.
These rules can be applied to specific bots, or entire bot categories. To specific routes, or route categories. Any specific content or types of content. How your site responds to a bot’s request is put fully in your control, to whatever extent you want.
Set access limits, like times of day, rates, number of requests over a time period, server costs per bot, priotize humans over bots, set off-limits areas, any kind of restrictions you want, and applied however you want.
robots.nxt can tell if it’s a person or a bot and dynamically modify its responses, and the bot will never be able to tell, because according to the bot, the responses from your server are what the website is.
After all, what is a website, other than what the server sends you?
So send the bot what you want them to see.
This kills any bots that you don’t want to deal with, controls the ones you do, and saves you opex you’re wasting on unmonetized traffic.
Sign up to robots.nxt
Step Three is Selling it Back You don’t want to get rid of all these bots. Some of them are good for you. And some of them you can demand payment from.
That’s the last step - a payment funnel that converts bot traffic to revenue.
robots.nxt can attach pricing to any interaction, creating a dynamic bot paywall. There’s a host of pre-made pricing strategies available that match most website purposes and content types, and you can make your own.
You can attach licenses to content so that it can be used for whatever purpose the bot is trying to get it for, like AI training. We have a bunch of standard licenses, and you can customize them or add your own.
The transactions are pure API. There’s no shopping cart, no checkout page. No human will ever see these parts of your website, because they’re not for humans.
The bot can pay with whatever method it has, and you can get paid in whatever way you prefer. Seamless, invisible, automated.
Your largest audience is now visible, managed, segmented, reduced to eliminate the ones you don’t want, and converted into cash flow.
That’s the internet of the future - that’s the revenue method for web3.
And that’s what your website needs.
A Brave New World With robots.nxt, it really is that simple: See, control, and convert.
Web3 is crypto and AI, and robots.nxt uses both to make you money.
Our analytics and management are free for the time being while we stress test and take your feedback. We’ll turn on the payment funnels and start charging soon.
It takes 5 minutes to set up, and you’ll never turn it off.
Bots are your largest audience, and it’s time to take back control with robots.nxt.