It’s not a good time to be a website operator who isn’t all that keen on being replaced by AI. Google’s AI Overviews ‘feature’, which throws up summaries from websites, is powered by the same section of the company that includes websites in Google’s search results.
According to Bloomberg, opting out of the ‘AI’ side of the equation will also opt sites out of the actually useful function provided by the search giant. In other words, if websites are unwilling to let their sites be crawled for AI purposes they’ll also be left out of Google’s search results. It might sound like an easy problem to surmount but the choice isn’t as simple as it might seem.
Google hunting for scrapes
Having website content condensed and shown in Google’s AI Overviews means that websites have to a) do the work they’ve always been doing and b) are denied any traffic for it. After all, if an AI has summarised everything, there’s little point in clicking through to see the larger explanation. This leads to less traffic for websites, while Google gets to continue making money by displaying ads next to this scraped information.
However, opting out of the Googlebot’s scraping means that any traffic from the search engine dies off immediately. The result is the same — the website in question loses traffic until it’s unable to sustain itself. The only question is the speed at which it happens.
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This forced choice is something the search giant can get away with right now because… well, it’s the biggest game in town. If you want to play on its stage, you must pay the price. Its current AI scraping policy means Google gets free data and more eyes directed at the advertising it sells and everyone else gets little or nothing in return. That’s a textbook definition of anticompetitive behaviour, something the company is currently in the crosshairs for.
Judges are already looking at possibly breaking one of the largest companies in tech into smaller, more easily regulated pieces. This could have a significant impact on Google as an entity, which is why it’s likely to fight any such efforts with everything it has. While its attitude toward AI scraping, including penalising anyone who doesn’t go along, might count against it in the long run, over the short to medium term it’s the folks who find their work chopped up and served as AI Overviews who will suffer.