They should opt out of Google. What they are doing here in open daylight is insane. They stole the entire internet to train their models and are now shoving AI overviews down everyones throat. Clicks to publishers were already decreasing over the last years even without AI, but 2026 is showing what the future will look like, zero clicks from Google, because they dont care. Google got what it wanted and is now racing to AGI spending all its cash on datacenters, not caring about all the casualties along the way. Google, on its current trajectory, is truly evil in my opinion.
I'm really not a fan of regulation, but someone has to step in and have Google seperate its products, search should be free of AI overviews imo.
llm crawlers - all they do is take. they craw your content. then give it to users in distilled form in the form of 'A.I overview' or summarized content.
incentives to contribute are gone genuine original content are gone. soon enough majority of the content will be llm generated, it not already.
the original content will either be in closed communities e.g discord, mailing lists. hence 'local'
Even before the onset of AI, publishers steal copyrighted work from writers and reporters and then turn it into human-generated slop and charge you money for the privilege of being misinformed.
Closed communities are not a viable alternative as their content has an even lower signal-to-noise ratio than AI-generated summaries. I have spent hours trying to piece together a reasonable set of answers from shitty searches on various forums and mailing lists. I'll take AI summaries any day over the crap that you can get from forums.
You'll need something to replace it first. And so many things depend on Google's monopoly, hell, you can't pay taxes in my country without Google's monopoly.
At this point, this will simply destroy publishers' business entirely. Which won't stop some of them, but the rest will see what happens and run back to Google.
(needed for identification to fill out online taxes which is the only option left)
How in the (excuse my French) f*ck is your government allowing google to login to do your taxes?? And it is the ONLY option??? I’m flabbergasted, honestly.
It's not Google login, it's the Google authenticator being the only practical 2-factor option to login to government services (still annoying, but less so than trying to get one of those calculators that cost 30 euros and haven't been in stock since COVID)
Absolutely. Even Apple Passwords does it now (but also a LOT of other apps, including free and open-source ones). google is definitely NOT a dependency here.
This feels like a move that might backfire, especially for the journalists at said publications. It's already harder to research niche topics than it used to be, given how much info is stuck in login only walled gardens like Discord (or things like social media posts and Google Docs shared on said services), and a lot of outlets tend to get their info from each other as well. You can't effectively investigate everything on your own, and keeping up with a huge list of other outlets and journalists on a site like Twitter would be hell. How do they plan to learn from other outlets and publishers when considering what to cover here?
Also RIP anyone who likes doing their own research I suppose. I've always found it useful to compare different publications' coverage of a trending story when trying to figure out what the true story is here, and that feels like it'll only get significantly more difficult to do if everyone ops out of Google or other search engines.
Google is not discovery mechanism for them anymore. They amount to free labor for Google. Basically, there are two futures: a.) they do free labor for google without being discoverable through them b.) they are not discoverable on google without providing free data to google.
Good points. On item B. In the natural experiment of AI getting between the information consumer and the information provider, it appears that even providing free data to Google, they're still not discoverable. What is the alternative mechanism for discovery? Do they flood the world with even more advertising as a way of forcing discovery onto consumers?
One step closer to Google deprecating search and just becoming an AI chatbot. By the way, most smaller publishers have already effectively left Google, they don't try to improve their SEO at all, and just promote their content on social media.
They should opt out of Google. What they are doing here in open daylight is insane. They stole the entire internet to train their models and are now shoving AI overviews down everyones throat. Clicks to publishers were already decreasing over the last years even without AI, but 2026 is showing what the future will look like, zero clicks from Google, because they dont care. Google got what it wanted and is now racing to AGI spending all its cash on datacenters, not caring about all the casualties along the way. Google, on its current trajectory, is truly evil in my opinion.
I'm really not a fan of regulation, but someone has to step in and have Google seperate its products, search should be free of AI overviews imo.
the era of wide spread 'global' web is over.
llm crawlers - all they do is take. they craw your content. then give it to users in distilled form in the form of 'A.I overview' or summarized content.
incentives to contribute are gone genuine original content are gone. soon enough majority of the content will be llm generated, it not already.
the original content will either be in closed communities e.g discord, mailing lists. hence 'local'
maybe video will survive but text/images - no.
Even before the onset of AI, publishers steal copyrighted work from writers and reporters and then turn it into human-generated slop and charge you money for the privilege of being misinformed.
Closed communities are not a viable alternative as their content has an even lower signal-to-noise ratio than AI-generated summaries. I have spent hours trying to piece together a reasonable set of answers from shitty searches on various forums and mailing lists. I'll take AI summaries any day over the crap that you can get from forums.
You'll need something to replace it first. And so many things depend on Google's monopoly, hell, you can't pay taxes in my country without Google's monopoly.
At this point, this will simply destroy publishers' business entirely. Which won't stop some of them, but the rest will see what happens and run back to Google.
(needed for identification to fill out online taxes which is the only option left)
How in the (excuse my French) f*ck is your government allowing google to login to do your taxes?? And it is the ONLY option??? I’m flabbergasted, honestly.
It's not Google login, it's the Google authenticator being the only practical 2-factor option to login to government services (still annoying, but less so than trying to get one of those calculators that cost 30 euros and haven't been in stock since COVID)
There's lots of apps that do TOTP, if that's what you're using it for.
Absolutely. Even Apple Passwords does it now (but also a LOT of other apps, including free and open-source ones). google is definitely NOT a dependency here.
This feels like a move that might backfire, especially for the journalists at said publications. It's already harder to research niche topics than it used to be, given how much info is stuck in login only walled gardens like Discord (or things like social media posts and Google Docs shared on said services), and a lot of outlets tend to get their info from each other as well. You can't effectively investigate everything on your own, and keeping up with a huge list of other outlets and journalists on a site like Twitter would be hell. How do they plan to learn from other outlets and publishers when considering what to cover here?
Also RIP anyone who likes doing their own research I suppose. I've always found it useful to compare different publications' coverage of a trending story when trying to figure out what the true story is here, and that feels like it'll only get significantly more difficult to do if everyone ops out of Google or other search engines.
Very brave of publishers to hold their own content hostage against Google search. That's certainly one noble way to die.
It's either that or let Google strangle them.
Yes, publishers should opt out of Google. Everyone has a right to be forgotten.
Okay, apart from that snarky retort, what discovery mechanism are they going to use to drive people to their human-generated slop?
Google is not discovery mechanism for them anymore. They amount to free labor for Google. Basically, there are two futures: a.) they do free labor for google without being discoverable through them b.) they are not discoverable on google without providing free data to google.
Good points. On item B. In the natural experiment of AI getting between the information consumer and the information provider, it appears that even providing free data to Google, they're still not discoverable. What is the alternative mechanism for discovery? Do they flood the world with even more advertising as a way of forcing discovery onto consumers?
One step closer to Google deprecating search and just becoming an AI chatbot. By the way, most smaller publishers have already effectively left Google, they don't try to improve their SEO at all, and just promote their content on social media.
Do you have evidence for this?
This was an entirely predictable outcome, first with summaries/snippets, and now with the AI summaries.
It was clear that eventually someone would decide to stop these parasites like google from accessing their content.
Good for them.