CEO of Largest U.S. Publisher Accuses Google of Being a ‘Bad Actor’ for Stealing Content to Support AI Products
In the digital publishing landscape, the CEO of a prominent U.S. publisher has levied accusations against Google for acting unethically by utilizing its web-crawling bots to support artificial intelligence (AI) products, which simultaneously index websites for search engine purposes and siphon content.
Neil Vogel, heading People, Inc., a conglomerate operating over 40 brands such as People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, Allrecipes, among others, alleges that Google’s practices are unfair due to the use of a single crawler for both search and AI purposes.
At Fortune Brainstorm Tech this week, Vogel stated, “Google employs one crawler, meaning they utilize the same crawler for their search, where they continue to generate traffic for us, as well as for their AI products, where they pilfer our content.”
Vogel emphasized that three years ago, Google Search accounted for approximately 65% of the company’s web traffic, a percentage that has since plummeted to the “high 20s.” In an earlier conversation with AdExchanger, he shared a more alarming statistic, revealing that at one point, Google’s open-web traffic constituted as much as 90% of People Inc.’s total traffic.
Despite these developments, Vogel affirmed the company’s growth and revenue increase. However, he expressed concerns about the misappropriation of content. “It’s not right that you can take our content to compete against us,” he told conference attendees.
Vogel advocates for publishers to secure more influence in the AI era and advocates blocking AI crawlers as a means to compel negotiations regarding content deals. For instance, People Inc. has employed Cloudflare’s latest solution to obstruct non-paying AI crawlers, eliciting potential partnership proposals from large language model providers. Although no agreements have been finalized, Vogel reported that the company has made significant progress since adopting the crawler-blocking tactic.
However, Vogel conceded that Google’s web crawler cannot be barred because such action would prevent the indexing of the publisher’s websites on Google Search, potentially cutting off a substantial percentage of the remaining traffic provided by the search engine.
“They are aware of this and deliberately act as a bad actor,” Vogel concluded.
Janice Min, CEO and editor-in-chief at newsletter provider Ankler Media, echoed these sentiments, referring to tech giants like Google and Meta as chronic “content pirates.”
“I don’t see the advantage in partnering with any AI company at this juncture,” Min stated, adding that her firm blocks AI crawlers.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who also participated on the panel, expressed optimism about future changes in AI companies’ behavior, potentially instigated by new regulations. He suggested that legal remedies around copyright law, developed during the pre-AI era, might not be the ideal solution.
Prince also contended, “Every problem plaguing the world today can be traced back to Google, in some way, because the search giant taught publishers to prioritize traffic over original content creation, leading to outlets like BuzzFeed to write for clicks.” Despite acknowledging Google’s current predicament, he projected that the company would likely start compensating content creators for web-crawling and using their content in AI models within a year.
