The CEOs of the largest digital and printing publishers in the United States have accused Google of being a bad actor who raw websites to support search giants’ AI products.
People, Inc is a publisher that operates over 40 brands including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Liedure, Getter Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, AllRecipes and more. Neil Vogel, CEO of (formerly Dotdash Meredith), said Google is not fair as Google uses the same bot to support AI using WebS.
“Google has one crawler, meaning that we use the same crawler for our search. There we send traffic just like we do with AI products.
He said three years ago Google searches accounted for around 65% of the company’s traffic, which fell to “high in their 20s.” (Vogel shared even more surprising statistics with Adexchanger last month, saying that as of a few years ago, Google’s traffic accounted for 90% of people’s traffic from the Open Web.)
“I’m not complaining. We’ve grown our audience. We’ve made money,” Vogel told conference attendees. “We’re doing well. What’s not right about this is that we can’t bring our content to compete with us.”
Vogel feels that it needs to block AI crawlers (an automated program that scans websites to train AI systems) as publishers believe they need more leverage in the AI era. For example, his company has a contract with Openai, which Vogel described as a “good actor.”
People Inc. leverages the latest solutions from Web Infrastructure Company’s CloudFlare to block non-payment AI crawlers and encourages AI players to approach publishers with potential content transactions. Vogel doesn’t directly name the companies involved, but he said he is a “large LLM provider.” Although there are no unsigned transactions yet, Vogel said it is “a lot more advanced” than before it adopted a crawler blocking solution.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
However, Vogel cannot block Google’s Crawler. This prevents publisher websites from showing indexes in Google searches and blocks “20%” of the traffic that Google still provides.
“They know this and they’re not splitting the crawlers, so they’re intentional bad actors here,” declared Vogel.
Janice Min, editor-in-chief and CEO of Newsletter Provider Ankler Media, called and agreed to major technology companies such as Google and Meta’s longtime Content Kleptomaniacs.
“We are not currently profiting from partnering with AI companies,” she said, adding that her company is blocking AI Crawls.
Meanwhile, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince has created an AI-Blocking solution (and also featured on the panel) and said he believes that things will change in the future when it comes to AI companies’ behavior. He suspected that these changes could be spurred by the new regulations.
CloudFlare executives also questioned whether fighting AI companies was the right answer using legal solutions like copyright law created in the pre-AI era.
“I think it’s a fool’s errands to go down the path, because under copyright law, the more derivatives these AI companies are actually creating derivatives,” Prince said. “And looking at the best case laws ever come up, it’s actually said that what humanity and others use is what has recently settled down at $1.5 billion with all book publishers, is that they can maintain the positive copyright ruling they have gained.”
Prince also declared, “All things that are wrong in today’s world are, at some level, Google’s fault.” Because search giants have taught publishers to value traffic through the creation of the original content, causing publishers like BuzzFeed to write for clicks. Still, he admitted that Google is in a tough place for now from a competitive standpoint.
“Internally, they’re having a huge fight over what they’re doing. My prediction is by this time next year, Google is going to raw content and take it, put it in an AI model and pay for content creators,” he said.
