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Publishers weigh blocking Google over AI answers
Publishers are reportedly weighing crawler blocks and search controls as Google’s AI answers reduce traffic and complicate content licensing.
Image: Gizmodo
Publishers are weighing whether to restrict or even sever Google’s access to their content as AI-generated search answers drain traffic, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
Some companies are reportedly considering blocking Google’s web crawlers entirely. Reddit, which signed a $60 million-per-year deal with Google in 2024 to make its posts available for AI scraping, has discussed cutting off the company’s access to its content for AI use, the Journal reported.
Publishers weigh search traffic against AI summaries
Other major publishers are also considering stronger measures. The president of Reuters said the company is evaluating the economic trade-offs between conventional search and AI summaries. Mike Reed, CEO of USA Today, said it was time to “take a stand,” while Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc., said completely blocking Google was “100% on the table.” Politico and The Economist are also assessing their options.
“We are certainly looking at the economic trade-offs between search and AI summaries.”
“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough.”
“Turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table.”
The Journal described a technical dilemma: Publishers can block crawling for AI model training, but generally need to permit crawling for both AI-generated results and traditional search if they want their pages to appear in either.
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Google crawler controls and the risk to search visibility
According to BotDetector, publishers may have more targeted options. Blocking Google’s Google-Extended crawler feature is intended to prevent content from being used to train models such as those in the Gemini family.
Keeping content out of Google’s AI Overviews may require the more aggressive nosnippet tag, which could reduce search visibility. The noindex tag is more severe: It blocks a page from search indexing altogether. If a critical mass of publishers adopted it, that would mark a significant escalation.
A Google spokesperson told the Journal that its AI sends “billions of clicks to the web every week” and said the company highlights links, helps publishers grow their audiences, and provides clear controls for website owners to manage their content.
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via Gizmodo
