Hey Nicolas, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing this, but All About Berlin was indispensable when I lived in Berlin from 2021 to 2024. I recommended your blog to all my immigrant friends. It was equally as helpful as the immigration lawyer I hired.

I don’t have any advice, but I do want to thank you for the thankless work you do on All About Berlin and say I’m sorry to hear how much LLMs have affected your business.

Brutal, and the choice is shitty too, block the ai crawlers and lose what little referral traffic they give. Allow the traffic and get summarised into oblivion.

I'm hoping you wouldn't completely give up. I've been making a conscious choice to use an actual pro-consumer search engine Kagi instead of LLMs, and blogs like yours are why.

I want to see websites like yours, made by people who actually like organizing information for others to learn from. Looking at your website would just be so much more joyful than scrolling through a glitchy chat box of soulless LLM-speak. It inspires me to finally make something like this myself for where I live.

There has to be something we could do other than resign ourselves to slop, some way we could monetize actually good websites like yours and bring more people to them. Maybe when alternative non-meta search engines Marginalia become useful for general queries. Maybe we could make some monetized webring like Nebula for YouTubers... We can't just give up.

Ok how could one protect from something like this?

- Put the information into an app and make it inaccessible for the LLM? - Add a paywall protection?

What?

How much money do you make roughly by this that this allows you to live from?

A handful guides don't give you that much revenue right?