Theft
CONTEUDO:
Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc., has publicly branded Google a “bad actor,” accusing the tech giant of weaponizing its search crawler to scrape content for its AI products without permission. During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, Vogel argued that Google’s refusal to separate its search indexer from its AI data-gathering bot forces publishers into a lose-lose situation.
The Dilemma: Traffic vs. AI Exploitation
According to Vogel, the publisher—which oversees over 40 brands including People, Food & Wine, and Allrecipes—is caught in a trap. Because Google uses a singular crawler for both search indexing and AI training, publishers cannot block AI scraping without simultaneously deleting their websites from Google Search results.
“Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,” Vogel stated. This dynamic has become increasingly critical as Google Search traffic to People, Inc. properties has plummeted from nearly 90% of total web traffic years ago to the “high 20s” today.
Leveraging New Tools for Content Control
To combat unauthorized scraping, People, Inc. has utilized Cloudflare’s AI-blocking solutions. While this move has successfully pressured other “large LLM providers” to negotiate content deals, it remains ineffective against Google due to the search engine’s market dominance.
Vogel emphasized that the goal is not to stop innovation, but to prevent companies from using proprietary content to build competing products. “You cannot take our content to compete with us,” he declared. While the company has already secured a partnership with OpenAI—which Vogel labeled a “good actor”—deals with other AI providers remain in the pipeline.
Industry Skepticism Toward Big Tech
The sentiment is shared across the publishing landscape. Janice Min, CEO of Ankler Media, echoed these concerns, describing Big Tech firms like Google and Meta as “content kleptomaniacs.” Min noted that she currently sees no strategic benefit in partnering with AI companies, opting instead to block their crawlers entirely.
The Future of AI and Copyright
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince offered a broader perspective on the conflict, suggesting that current copyright litigation may be a “fool’s errand.” Prince noted that under existing fair use doctrines, AI-generated derivatives are difficult to challenge legally.
Despite the current friction, Prince remains optimistic that the landscape will shift. “My prediction is that, by this time next year, Google will be paying content creators for crawling their content and taking it and putting it in AI models,” he said, citing internal pressure and the potential for new regulations to force a change in Google’s business model.