The CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. has accused Google of being a bad actor for crawling its websites to support the search giant\u2019s AI products.<\/p>\n
Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc.<\/a> (formerly Dotdash Meredith), a publisher that operates over 40 brands, including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, Allrecipes, and others, said that Google is not playing fair because it uses the same bot to crawl websites to index them for the Google search engine as it does to support its AI features.<\/p>\n \u201cGoogle 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,\u201d said Vogel, speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n He noted that three years ago, Google Search accounted for about 65% of the company\u2019s traffic and that has since dropped to the \u201chigh 20s.\u201d (Vogel shared an even more startling statistic with AdExchanger last month, saying that as of several years ago, Google\u2019s traffic accounted for as much as 90%<\/a> of People Inc.\u2019s traffic from the open web.)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not complaining. We\u2019ve grown our audience. We\u2019ve grown our revenue,\u201d Vogel told conference attendees. \u201cWe\u2019re doing great. What is not right about this is: You cannot take our content to compete with us.\u201d<\/p>\n Vogel believes publishers need more leverage in the AI era, which is why he feels it\u2019s necessary to block AI crawlers \u2014 automated programs that scan websites to train AI systems \u2014 as that can force them into content deals. His company, for example, has a deal with OpenAI, which Vogel described as a \u201cgood actor.\u201d<\/p>\n People Inc. has been leveraging web infrastructure company Cloudflare\u2019s latest solution to block AI crawlers<\/a> that don\u2019t pay, prompting AI players to approach the publisher with potential content deals. While Vogel wouldn\u2019t directly name the companies involved, he said they were \u201clarge LLM providers.\u201d No deals have been signed yet, but Vogel said the company is \u201cmuch further along\u201d than before it adopted the crawler-blocking solution.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco However, Vogel pointed out, Google\u2019s crawler can\u2019t be blocked because doing so would also prevent the publisher\u2019s websites from being indexed in Google Search, cutting off that \u201c20%-ish\u201d of traffic that Google still delivers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey know this, and they\u2019re not splitting their crawler. So they are an intentional bad actor here,\u201d Vogel declared. <\/p>\n Janice Min, the editor-in-chief and CEO at newsletter provider Ankler Media<\/a>, agreed, calling Big Tech companies like Google and Meta longtime \u201ccontent kleptomaniacs.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see the benefit to us in partnering with any AI company right now,\u201d she said, adding that her company blocks AI crawlers.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, whose company makes the AI-blocking solution (and who was also on the panel), said he believed that things would still change in the future when it comes to how the AI companies behave. He suspected those changes could be prompted by new regulations.<\/p>\n The Cloudflare exec also questioned whether fighting the AI companies using legal solutions around things like copyright law, created for the pre-AI era, was the right answer. <\/p>\n \u201cI think that it\u2019s a fool\u2019s errand to go down that path, because, in copyright law, typically, the more derivative something is, the more it\u2019s protected under fair use\u00a0\u2026 What these AI companies are doing is they\u2019re actually creating derivatives,\u201d Prince said. \u201cAnd so if you look at the best case law that\u2019s come out so far, it\u2019s actually said that the use by Anthropic and others \u2014 the reason Anthropic settled recently<\/a> with all the book publishers for $1.5 billion \u2014 was for them to be able to preserve the positive copyright ruling that they got.\u201d<\/p>\n Prince also proclaimed that \u201ceverything that\u2019s wrong with the world today is, at some level, Google\u2019s fault,\u201d because the search giant had taught publishers to value traffic over original content creation, triggering publishers like BuzzFeed to write for clicks. Still, he admitted that Google was in a tough spot right now from a competitive standpoint.<\/p>\n \u201cInternally, they\u2019re having massive fights about what they do, and 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. has accused Google of being a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":223454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2722,121245,121246,121247,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-223453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-google","9":"tag-neil-vogel","10":"tag-people-inc","11":"tag-pubishers","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115196811388652689","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n