SUMMARYMajor publishers including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, Reuters, and Reddit are reassessing their relationships with Google over how its AI systems use their content and reduce referral traffic. Some outlets are considering blocking Google’s crawlers, while others have filed lawsuits over AI summaries. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said bot traffic recently surpassed human traffic for the first time, and USA Today’s U.S. traffic has fallen by nearly half over the past year.
Futurism reports:
[Some online publications] are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating. According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, and Reuters are all reexamining their relationship with Google. Some are debating whether to continue to work with the tech giant at all... Even Reddit executives are reevaluating the company's $60 million-a-year contract that allows Google to train its AI models on user-submitted content on the platform. They've similarly watched as Google's AI features discourage users from navigating to Reddit...
Beyond pondering whether to cut Google off, other publishers have resorted to suing the company, accusing it of illegally rehashing their intellectual property via AI summaries. It's an extremely undesirable position for publishers. By severing ties with the search giant, they could face even steeper declines in traffic. At the same time, there's seemingly little to gain from having Google's AIs crawl their content - and in the long term, it could guarantee their destruction.
Two interesting data points from the article:
"Last month, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noticed that automated bot traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in the internet's history."
"USA Today has seen its traffic from US users drop by almost half over the last year."