Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. — the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. — has accused Google of unfairly using publishers’ content to train its AI tools. Vogel claims Google uses the same crawler that indexes content for search to also fuel its AI products, leaving publishers with little recourse.
“Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,” Vogel said during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week.
Traffic Declines for Publishers
According to Vogel, Google’s search traffic once made up about 65% of People Inc.’s audience but has now fallen into the “high 20s.” He previously revealed that several years ago, Google accounted for as much as 90% of the company’s open web traffic.
Although Vogel stressed that People Inc. has continued to grow in both audience and revenue, he argued that Google’s practices undermine the value of original content. “You cannot take our content to compete with us,” he said.
To push back, People Inc. has adopted Cloudflare’s AI-crawler blocking technology. Vogel said this approach has already prompted large AI players to approach his company about licensing deals, though no agreements have yet been signed.
Vogel pointed to OpenAI as a “good actor” and noted his company already has a deal with them. By contrast, he argued, Google avoids fair negotiations because publishers cannot block its crawler without also losing visibility in Google Search.
Other Media Voices Join In
Janice Min, CEO of Ankler Media, echoed Vogel’s criticism, calling Big Tech companies like Google and Meta “content kleptomaniacs.” She said her company blocks AI crawlers entirely and sees no benefit in partnering with AI firms under current terms.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, also on the panel, suggested regulation may eventually force AI companies to pay publishers. He added that current copyright laws, written for a pre-AI era, may not be the right tool to resolve disputes.
Prince went further, blaming Google for years of incentivizing publishers to chase traffic instead of prioritizing content quality. Still, he predicted that Google may ultimately start paying publishers by next year for crawling their content for AI use.
Author’s Opinion
The fight between publishers and Google over AI crawling feels like history repeating itself. Publishers once handed Google the keys by optimizing everything for search traffic, and now AI threatens to squeeze them further. Relying on regulation may take years, but blocking AI crawlers could finally give publishers leverage they lacked in the search era. If companies like People Inc. can hold firm, this might be the moment where content creators stop being passengers and actually start driving the business deals.
Featured image credit: Arkan Perdana via Unsplash
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