Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.

He didn't say that.

Then the title of this post desperately needs changing.

> I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work

Why would he take down his content if it's not due to AI?

He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from?

I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI.

I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.