For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
Sounds like they want DRM,
Sounds like people don’t want AI scrapers like Google taking from their websites without their consent, which allows Google to further centralize and corporatize the web.
And they may also want a magical unicorn for a pet. Simply wanting a thing doesn’t conjure it into existence.
They want the same thing that people who want DRM want - a way to show their content to a viewer without that viewer being able to copy what they’re seeing. It’s just as impossible either way. As with DRM there may be tricks one can come up with to hinder it temporarily under some circumstances, but fundamentally data is data. If someone can see it then someone can copy it.
The companies doing the unethical scraping are the megatech companies: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic. They can absolutely be reigned in.
Megacorps invented DRM to try to keep their profits from the public. Now megacorps are trying to scrape up everybody else’s data and close off the public. That’s literally the goal of Google’s zero-click AI.
Also Moonshot, Alibaba, Baidu. Can they also be reined in?
It doesn’t matter who invented DRM. My point is that DRM fundamentally doesn’t work. If you pubish a web page in a manner that allows humans to read it then it’s also readable by AIs. A pinkie-promise not to is the best you can get.
That’s like saying copyright doesn’t work. If a human can see it a human can copy it
This post is about Google, so that’s why I’m focusing on Google. This is a positive step forward against one massive, unethical, evil AI company.
Defeatism just benefits them. We don’t need it.
Eh, it’s less about defeatism and more that I’m watching a fight between two assholes so I’m finding it hard to empathize with either side.
Like… Publishers regularly screwed over consumers, content creators, and tried to break the web multiple times. They can bleed for all I care
Guess we’ll see, then. I suspect the result is going to be a bunch of websites going “huh? Where did all our traffic suddenly disappear to?”
Google’s zero-click AI search is already harming small publishers! I’m glad we have some common ground on opposing that.
Pushing for regulation against providing AI results would be a great start, which would make the step in this article unnecessary.
Trying to legislate the world to go back to the way it was in 2023 probably isn’t going to work any better than DRM does.