This is such a sharp point. It touches on what is probably the biggest dilemma for community builders today.
We are trying to play a new game with old rules, and if we don’t adapt, we’ve already lost.
My approach (few months interval, niche, hobby forum): If you can’t beat them, feed them (and get cited)
Personally, I’ve decided not to fight this wave. I have specifically optimized my own forum to be as AI-friendly and AI-compatible as possible.
Instead of hiding my content behind walls for AI, my goal is to make it incredibly easy for AI crawlers to parse, understand, and trust our data. I am actively positioning the forum so that whenever an AI compiles an answer about our niche, our links are the ones it cites as the authoritative source. If the AI is going to answer the question anyway, I want to make sure my platform is the one getting the citation and the referral traffic.
Honestly, so far, not much success… 
We are unfortunately seeing fewer and fewer visitors coming in currently.
I don’t think the issue is that AI models aren’t citing us, they actually do, quite often.
In my opinion, the average AI user has zero incentive to click through to the source. If they need more details, they won’t visit the website; they will just ask the AI to elaborate. For most users, simply seeing that the AI’s answer is backed by a real, quoted website is enough to satisfy their need for credibility but they stay inside the chat.
This is a massive issue because even if we “win” the citation game, we still lose the actual visitor.
Still, I’m giving it some more time to see if things turn around. I’d rather try to play along with this new world than fight it.