Notes ·
Google Used to Be the Company Everyone Wanted Sending Them Traffic
Victor Tangermann writes for Futurism about the worsening relationship between Google and the publishers whose work made its search engine valuable.
For years, getting indexed by Google was essential. Publishers optimized their sites, supplied structured data and welcomed its crawler because Google helped people discover their work. It was an imperfect partnership, but both sides received something useful.
That relationship is flipping.
Google’s AI features can now summarize information directly on the results page, giving people fewer reasons to visit the websites that researched, reported and published it. Futurism points to reporting that major outlets, including USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People and Reuters, are reconsidering whether continuing to provide Google access is still worth it. Reddit is reportedly reassessing its own licensing relationship as Google sends it less traffic.
Publishers are trapped. Blocking Google could make their traffic collapse even faster, but allowing Google to keep crawling their work may help it build products that replace the need to visit them at all.
Google was once the company everyone wanted to partner with to get onto the web. Now publishers are asking whether they need to protect the web from Google.
The most shortsighted part is that Google still depends on an active open web producing original information. If independent sites, journalists and communities cannot support themselves, the supply of useful human-created material eventually dries up. Google may be consuming the ecosystem that made it powerful.