Google search, displayed on a smartphone. (Photo by Thilina Kaluthotage/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel didn’t mince words this week at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. Talking about the future of digital media companies like his against the backdrop of an increasingly AI-driven internet, Vogel turned his attention to Google — a company he described as “the worst” when it comes to how publishers are treated in this new era.
Vogel’s complaint was straightforward: The old bargain between search engines and publishers is now effectively broken. “Google Search, three years ago, was about 65-ish percent of our traffic. Now, it is high 20’s percent of our traffic,” he said. While People Inc. — which owns titles like Food & Wine magazine — has grown its overall audience and revenue, the dramatic loss of search referrals underscores what Vogel called an unfair dynamic. “For a long time, the deal was: Take our content, build your search engine, send us back traffic.
“That deal’s off.”
Google Search changes, and the future of digital media
Google, Vogel explained, has essentially blurred the line between Search and its AI products. Unlike other AI players, which publishers can block from training on their material, Google doesn’t allow publishers to cut themselves off from its AI systems without simultaneously eliminating Google sending what little search traffic remains to them. Vogel called that setup evidence that Google is acting “intentionally” as a bad actor. “As a creator of content, you have to find a market for your content … what we now have to make sure happens is that nobody takes it. You can’t take what is great and you make money from it without sharing it (with) us.”
Of course, it’s also not just Google Search where this sort of thing is happening. A recent analysis in The Atlantic found that more than 15.8 million YouTube videos from over 2 million channels have been scraped without permission in order to train AI systems. Those videos, spread across at least 13 datasets circulated by researchers and various tech firms, are more proof of how casually AI models are being fed the creative work of others – where no explicit permission was given for that to occur.
News publishers are battling some AI firms in court, with The New York Times engaged in litigation against OpenAI over claims that its articles were used without permission. At the same time, Vogel points to something even more immediate and existential than the courtroom fight: The collapse of referral traffic as users increasingly find everything they need inside AI-generated search answers.
All of this arrives against the backdrop of Google possibly preparing to flip a switch that could accelerate the crisis even more. As I wrote earlier this week, Google executives have telegraphed that “AI Mode” — essentially, a chatbot that synthesizes the information contained in search results and minimizes publisher links — is on track to roll out as, if not the default Search experience soon then one that’s much more integrated into main Search on Google.
The implications are obvious: if readers barely click past AI Overviews now, what happens when that very chatbot is the user’s front door to the internet?
The irony is that Google had until very recently insisted that the “web is thriving.” Yet in its own court filings, the company now admits that the open web is already in “rapid decline.” Notwithstanding that doublespeak, the numbers certainly speak for themselves. Similarweb data, for example, shows that sites like Business Insider and HuffPost have lost more than half of their search traffic in the past three years.
That’s why the video below from the Fortune conference is titled “Search Engine Zero” – an allusion to what’s starting to look like a not-so-distant future, when Google sends absolutely no search traffic to outside sites like news publishers – while at the same time striving to keep users inside Google’s own ecosystem for as long as possible, at the expense of those publishers.