As publishers weigh blocking the Google crawler, the quality of Google Search results could decline. AI-generated image by Mark Stenberg via Gemini By Mark Stenberg --> This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here .
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.
Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.
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.”
While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.
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“We provide web publishers with clear, granular controls to manage their content, including Google-Extended for AI training and a new Search Console control we are testing for generative AI Search features, neither of which impact traditional Search visibility,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. “We are committed to designing AI experiences that highlight the web, drive valuable traffic to publishers, and provide the insights they need to succeed.”
Historically, abandoning Google Search would have been commercial suicide, according to SEO consultant Lily Ray. It is simply too valuable of a source of audience discovery and traffic.
“It’s a really hard tradeoff. Some publishers have already blocked OpenAI until it strikes partnerships, but with Google it’s hard,” Ray said. “Google is a different conversation because it has so many more users than other AI firms.”
But the gradual erosion of search traffic in recent years has, paradoxically, given publishers more agency to consider walking away from the platform.
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