Google Steals Content: People CEO Accuses Search Giant
News Context
At a glance
- (formerly Dotdash Meredith), Neil Vogel, has publicly accused Google of using its web crawler unfairly to support its AI products, effectively "stealing" content from publishers.
- Vogel spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference regarding this issue.He emphasizes that while People, Inc.is growing its audience and revenue, it's unfair for Google to utilize their...
- The company is using Cloudflare to charge AI bots for scraping data, which has prompted AI companies to reach out for potential content deals.
People, Inc. Accuses Google of Content Theft for AI Training
Table of Contents
The CEO of People, Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), Neil Vogel, has publicly accused Google of using its web crawler unfairly to support its AI products, effectively “stealing” content from publishers.
Key Details
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Publisher | People, Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith) – operates over 40 brands including People, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, etc. |
| CEO | Neil Vogel |
| Accusation | Google uses the same crawler for both indexing for search *and* training its AI models, using publisher content without fair compensation. |
| Traffic Shift (Google Search) | Decreased from ~65% of traffic 3 years ago to the “high 20s” currently. previously, Google accounted for as much as 90% of open web traffic. |
| AI Crawler Blocking Strategy | Leveraging cloudflare’s solution to block unpaid AI crawlers, aiming to negotiate content deals. |
| Content Deals | Currently in discussions with “large LLM providers” (no names disclosed), and making progress. Has a deal with OpenAI. |
| Blocking Google’s Crawler | Not possible, as it would also block legitimate search indexing. |
Context & Background
Vogel spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference regarding this issue.He emphasizes that while People, Inc.is growing its audience and revenue, it’s unfair for Google to utilize their content to compete with them without proper agreements.
The company is using Cloudflare to charge AI bots for scraping data, which has prompted AI companies to reach out for potential content deals.
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