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.”
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.
You can, in fact, legislate to enact a better status quo. America has a history of civil rights laws that demonstrate as much.
You don’t have to “legislate the world” to make some positive change.
Ah, one of those believe in the system guys. The US history on civil rights is one of horror and oppression.
While I agree with your points and sentiment, the US civil rights laws (including the Civil Rights Act) are being continuously torn apart by billionaires and religious lunatics, so maybe not the best example.
Regardless, there are plenty of examples of laws succeeding in bettering the status quo going even as far back as Babylon.