Google is the kingmaker and basically a monopoly on search.
If you're going to light up dollars to share with a bot, let it be with google, who on a lucky day might decide you are king (because you let them index your site)
I would presume and assume google obeys the robots.txt mandate as well.
But I would agree it's a very outstanding and real problem that is YC-worthy - sharing structured webpage data with trusted partners in a generic and efficient way. I've heard about various AI companies that perform such data scraping and structuring with AI, forget the name - this is many notches in sophistication above a Selenium-headless type driver. If only html were made into a model-view-controller neatly and users were let to bring their own views & controllers.
But I would agree it's a very outstanding and real problem that is YC-worthy - sharing structured webpage data with trusted partners in a generic and efficient way. I've heard about various AI companies that perform such data scraping and structuring with AI, forget the name - this is many notches in sophistication above a Selenium-headless type driver. If only html were made into a model-view-controller neatly and users were let to bring their own views & controllers.