The unfortunate downside is that you start losing some influence in search engines and AI this way… with Discourse for example, if someone asked “can I build a forum that does X”, it’s likely an answer will be available via Meta.
Without that sort of content being indexed, someone might end up with a conclusion that points to a competitor simply because their answer is more readily available (which has been the SEO battle before AI).
So if you’re not careful, instead of people finding answers about your offering via an AI discussion and skipping your website… you might find that what you’re offering isn’t relevant enough to be mentioned at all.
It’s a conundrum! At the core of it “what can your forum give me that other places can not” has always been a good question, but at least without direct participation you could get an idea of how useful content was by measuring visits.
With AI capturing much more of that non-participatory traffic, emphasis kind of has to shift away from measuring it as value and towards what brings people back to participate directly. Building a reputation that carries some influence, seeing your feature request get implemented, sharing something you’ve made, helping someone get unstuck in very specific situations… there’s still some stuff that AI can’t provide, and maybe we can find some more to lean on.