Three years ago I predicted that Google’s AI summaries would trigger a death spiral for the web in a piece for The Atlantic. This is back when the AI summary in search results were only showing up for some users. To me—a journalist who writes articles that depend on search traffic—there was an inevitable consequence of this feature: the websites I write for would see drastically reduced traffic.
Some publications would die, which is already happening. Others would adjust tactics, pulling their articles from search results to avoid their content being scraped by Google. “In a world where Google Search is no longer a reliable source of traffic, expect more sites to put up paywalls,” I said. “Traditionally, sites with paywalls still show up in search results, because they specifically opted in to be there. Will they keep doing that if Google could take their work and feed it into the AI wood chipper?”
The answer, for at least some publishers, is no. Mark Stenberg, in a newsletter piece re-published on Adweek, reports that several publications—including USA Today—are considering de-listing their sites from Google entirely unless the search giant pays for access.
“Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers,” Stenberg writes. “As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to [USA Today CEO Mike] Reed.” Cloudflare, a major content delivery service, is also considering blocking Google by default—publications would have to change a setting to allow indexing.
Google changed the terms of publishing online. For decades Google indexed the web and, in return, gave publishers traffic. Now they’re just going to index the web and show users a summary of it, meaning only Google gets traffic (and ad revenue). Why should publishers take that deal? It makes sense that some are starting to decide (or at least threatening) not to.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I was right three years ago, and I can confidently say whatever’s next isn’t going to be great for the open web.
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