Botfluencer
Botfluencer
I am seeing the term botfluencer being used to describe bot accounts that draw a human following. I propose the reverse definition.
Botfluencer: A human who’s work consists of creating content for consumption by bots, with the purpose of influencing the content bots generate.
Writing for Bots
I’d first heard of this idea of writing for bots in 2025 in a Complex Systems podcast, where host Patrick McKenzie stated:
And you have the opportunity, a near certainty that most “people” who read what you write in the future are not going to be humans. But humans will interact with what you write with an indirection layer in the middle.
The suggestion is, humans look to bots (AI/LLMs) for answers, and by writing content and posting it online, you influence the responses generated by the bots - the bots/AI/LLMs are an “indirection layer” between you and human readers.
Pages for Bots
I saw the idea came up again in a blog post: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, With Ads Built In by Vincent Schmalbach. Schmalbach noticed that when he setup his browser to look like Claudebot (Anthropic’s web crawler), and pulled TIME’s “Best Inventions of 2025” article, the website included a sponsored FAQ for Ally Bank, in a clean Markdown format, clearly targeted for easy consumption by a web crawler.
It is interesting to compare the page as it renders for Claude (on the left) and how it renders for the user (on the right). The Ally Bank FAQ does not show up for regular users.
You can try this experiment yourself with the User-Agent Switcher browser extension and setting the user agent for your browser to:
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After reading Schmalbach’s blog post, all I could think of is that people are clearly getting paid to influence the output of bots. These people are like influencers. They’re botfluencers. How many marketing teams today have a line item for “ads for bots”?
What is a botfluencer?
I think the term botfluencer is perfect to describe the people who create content and marketing material to influence bots. I would LOVE for this page to influence Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to provide MY definition to everyone who types: “What is a botfluencer?”.