Google to Publishers: We Can Kill Ya Quick Or We Can Kill Ya Slow

Publishers are facing a hell of a dilemma as regards Google’s dumb “AI” summaries of their content. Given that Google is offering users janky summaries of publisher’s content, they have fewer and fewer reasons to click through to the source. This is less than ideal! But cutting Google off means cutting your content off from the recently adjudicated search monopolists listings completely, casting themselves into the abyss. Basically, you aren’t going to SEO your way out of the first problem, and the second problem is almost certainly fatal. What ever happened to “Don’t be evil?”

Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content.

That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online.

Google’s dominance in search — which a federal court ruled last week is an illegal monopoly — is giving it a decisive advantage in the brewing AI wars, which search startups and publishers say is unfair as the industry takes shape. The dilemma is particularly acute for publishers, which face a choice between offering up their content for use by AI models that could make their sites obsolete and disappearing from Google search, a top source of traffic.

Talking Point Memo’s publisher offers a concise description of the publisher’s dilemma:

“It becomes like an existential crisis for these companies,” said Joe Ragazzo, publisher of the news site Talking Points Memo. “These are two bad options. You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly, because eventually they’re not going to need you either.”

And Google isn’t just muscling publishers. They’re using their monopoly to strangle “AI” startups in their cribs as well. To be fair, I’m far less sympathetic to these aspiring vampires, though at least they are paying for at least some of the content they’re hoovering up across the web. Google? Not so much.

The rise of generative AI has touched off a new wave of startups seeking to offer search products in which AI models deliver succinct answers to users’ questions. The chatbots’ popularity has sparked a panic within Google about the future of its search engine, which for so long seemed invincible. But before these startups can truly threaten the search giant’s business, they must crawl the web. And that’s no easy feat.

Being crawled costs website owners money, computing power and storage, so many publishers include a file that sets out rules for bots visiting their sites. The companies given the most leeway are usually Google and Microsoft’s Bing, which can drive traffic to sites through their search engines.

But search startups can’t promise such traffic before gaining traction — which is one reason why the young firms have begun striking deals to pay publishers to license content, said Alex Rosenberg, chief executive officer of Tako Inc., an AI startup.

“Now you have a bunch of tech companies that are paying for content, they're paying for access to that because they need it to be able to compete in any kind of serious way,” Rosenberg said. “Whereas for Google, they don't really have to do that.”

Amid a wave of deal-making between media companies and AI startups, Google has been a notable holdout. With the exception of a reported $60 million deal with Reddit Inc., Google has signaled to publishers behind closed doors that it is not interested in negotiating, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

Publishers can absolutely cutoff these startups. They really can’t with Google and Google knows it. And they are acting accordingly, just like any gangster/monopolist would.