I think it's a bit intellectually dishonest to claim an equivalence between content indexing for search engines and machine learning for LLMs. They might share an underlying harvesting technique, but their uses -- indexing for information accessibility vs automatic content production are qualitatively different.

Further, almost every site has had an e.g. robots.txt which has permitted content harvesting only for certain accepted purposes for a couple decades now. So clearly people already had a sense of how they wanted their content harvested and for what purposes.