Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say 37
Google's new AI Mode for Search, which is rolling out to everyone in the U.S., has sparked outrage among publishers, who call it "the definition of theft" for using content without fair compensation and without offering a true opt-out option. Internal documents revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week suggest that Google considered giving publishers more control over how their content is used in AI-generated results but ultimately decided against it, prioritizing product functionality over publisher protections.
News/Media Alliance slammed Google for "further depriving publishers of original content both traffic and revenue." Their full statement reads: "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." 9to5Google's take: It's not hard to see why Google went the route that it did here. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of AI products while still benefiting from Search would ultimately make Google's flashy new tools useless if enough sites made the switch. It was very much a move in the interest of building a better product.
Does that change anything regarding how Google's AI products in Search cause potential harm to the publishing industry? Nope.
Google's tools continue to serve the company and its users (mostly) well, but as they continue to bleed publishers dry, those publishers are on the verge of vanishing or, arguably worse, turning to cheap and poorly produced content just to get enough views to survive. This is a problem Google needs to address, as it's making the internet as a whole worse for everyone.
News/Media Alliance slammed Google for "further depriving publishers of original content both traffic and revenue." Their full statement reads: "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." 9to5Google's take: It's not hard to see why Google went the route that it did here. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of AI products while still benefiting from Search would ultimately make Google's flashy new tools useless if enough sites made the switch. It was very much a move in the interest of building a better product.
Does that change anything regarding how Google's AI products in Search cause potential harm to the publishing industry? Nope.
Google's tools continue to serve the company and its users (mostly) well, but as they continue to bleed publishers dry, those publishers are on the verge of vanishing or, arguably worse, turning to cheap and poorly produced content just to get enough views to survive. This is a problem Google needs to address, as it's making the internet as a whole worse for everyone.
Might is right (Score:1)
That's the depth of Big Tech's philosophical thought.
Re: Might is right (Score:2)
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Maybe they need a dictionary? (Score:2, Informative)
Whatever this is, it's definitely not "the definition of theft."
Nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
Create websites of meaningless drivel and exceptionally long, deliberately poorly formatted prose to maximize the number of ads you can shovel at people, and of course we're going to favor a tool that can summarize the bullshit and eliminate the ads .Find a better business model, or gtfo.
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SEO was a result of trying to vie for placement in the Google search listings.
Now Google is just plain stealing the content the same way that Facebook did with "content preview."
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Create websites of meaningless drivel and exceptionally long, deliberately poorly formatted prose to maximize the number of ads you can shovel at people, and of course we're going to favor a tool that can summarize the bullshit and eliminate the ads .Find a better business model, or gtfo.
Google to the rescue. Take that nasty ads!
Stop giving it to them for free? (Score:2)
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You bet they won't subscribe. And sometimes you shouldn't either. As soon as you subscribe you need to accept (usually quite extensive) ToS.
Afterward you may, for example, have legitimized extensive tracking techniques that require opt-in. As anonymous visitor they need to ask you and need to provide you a "reject all" button, see recent lawsuits. If you sign up, the "accept all" is in their ToS and if you browse logged in, they can do what's in their ToS.
And Google definitely does not want to follow a thou
"What're you gonna do about it- (Score:2)
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Capitalism is not at risk here. Publishing and journalism are.
Re: "What're you gonna do about it- (Score:2)
Free journalism, as in ad-derived click bait?
Yeah I think we can do without that. All news I read is paid for.
Re: "What're you gonna do about it- (Score:1)
How much information is produced but not sold, so you have to find it without google? Is there really a scarcity of information, or just of salesmanship? Was Ptolemy just a better salesman than Aristarchus of Samos?
robots.txt (Score:3)
robots.txt is the opt-out.
You can't eat your cake and have it too. The new results pages of many search engines will look like this. Exclude yourself from their index, if you don't want to appear there.
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Looks like the ad driven web may be heading to an end. That's a shame because unless we get a way to open one account that we can allow a website to access to pay with, I'm not getting an account for every website on the Internet that "might" be interesting or worth it.
Of course, with AI committing copyright violations, you get no traffic anyway. You could just pay out of pocket. Maybe your mom will read your site :)
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So what do you want?
Eat your cake? Or have your cake?
Your post seems to assume that Google has any obligation to work as it worked before. Google tries to sell ads and to do so, it tries to provide a good service to the users, so they use Google and click ads while using it. The previous model was good for the websites, the new one may be a bit worse. But Google never claimed to provide a service to the websites. If you want Google to provide a service to your website, buy ads. That's what they offer for we
Publishers? How about SEO-driven sites (Score:3)
Most of these sites are garbage, existing for no reason other than to catch clicks and serve ads.
Websites that have an actual reason to exist, won't be harmed by AI Mode.
In life, and on the web, you can tell a lot about the value of a thing, based on one principle: Is somebody pushing it on you, or are you looking for it? If somebody is pushing their thing on you, it's definitely not as valuable as the pusher makes it seem. If you really need it, you'll go looking for it.
Re: Publishers? How about SEO-driven sites (Score:1)
Is it pushy to wonder if SEO CEOs would be better off on a generous, inflation-proofed, non-tax-funded basic income, because they could just enjoy content instead of selling it?
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Sarcasm? Because if not, that statement contradicts itself in so many ways.
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You are stuck in 2005. Sites like that haven't been seen in google in 20 years.
>Websites that have an actual reason to > exist, won't be harmed by AI Mode.
What about people like Tomiko Harvey who was making $12000 a month off her travel blog, and home spun recipe sites. She got nailed with all the AI updates and now makes $300 a month of the same content. https://tomikoharvey.com/googl... [tomikoharvey.com]
50% of the ad supported website that existed off Google referrals will be don
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You are stuck in 2005. Sites like that haven't been seen in google in 20 years.
Today's version looks different, but it's not really that different. These days, the SEO garbage shows you interesting search result listings, but when you click the link, you are immediately confronted with a paywall, or a scraped clone of another site's user discussion, with multiple ads per comment. The death of those old SEO sites has been greatly exaggerated.
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Paywalls generally only occur in Google News (or places where google has paid for content). Google removes sites that attempt to run a paywall or subscribe wall in organic Serps. They get called out for Cloaking and penalized.
> The death of those old SEO sites has been greatly exaggerated.
In 2015, we estimated there are 9500 firms in the US specializing in SEO. Today you'd be hard pressed to find 1k. Then we get into the affiliate space where it is a fraction - maybe 20% of what it was t
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Paywalls generally only occur in Google News
No. Paywalls also occur on how-to sites, photo or clip art sites, and user forums. You click Google's link, and you get a blurb echoing what you were searching for, and inviting you to sign up for an account to see the results.
I can't say I'm sad about your industry disappearing, though I'm not sure it's so gone yet. These days, every company's internal marketing team, does their own in-house SEO.
Re: Publishers? How about SEO-driven sites (Score:2)
What steams me up is how big tech creates the conditions for garbage generation then offer to help filter it out. It's like a real estate agent double ending a deal... good for biz though
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Google and friends have been "censoring" the internet long before AI summaries. Search engines routinely promote or demote search results based on many criteria, some of which you would agree with, and some of which you would not. AI doesn't really change this.
What steams me up is how big tech creates the conditions for garbage generation then offer to help filter it out
I see it as more of an arms race. Google wants to show users what they are trying to find. SEO companies try to scam the system to show you what *they* want you to find.
As a basic example, Google's original algorithm was simple: count links (from othe
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It all kind of brings us back to pre internet days. When information was in books and books were in libraries. Searching/Finding information wasn't as easy as it is today. Certain people, scholars in a narrow field were the gatekeepers and wizards of knowledge. Once there is an infinite amount of web content, then authoritative indexing or se
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Thankfully, for those who really want to know, there is still Wikipedia, and it is relatively open-minded about what gets seen.
Tech companies are parasites killing the host (Score:1)
Soon all they will have left to steal will be their own excrement.
Google’s AI Mode: Predatory and Unrepentant (Score:2)
This isn’t innovation. This is strategic theft at scale, engineered by a company that knows exactly what it’s doing and did it anyway. Google’s new AI Mode isn’t a feature—it’s a weaponization of market dominance, aimed squarely at the throat of the open web.
Let’s be precise: