Even without all those, suppose Washington Post publishes a big exclusive story, there are going to be many websites that paraphrase the article and likely link

Even without all those, suppose Washington Post publishes a big exclusive story, there are going to be many websites that paraphrase the article and likely link to it, many of which don't block GPT bot. Even without the exact words, with multiple sources GPT should be able to easily figure out the original story. I don't see blocking helpful in such cases.