Publishers consider opting out of Google as search traffic declines

They should opt out of Google. What they are doing here in open daylight is insane. They stole the entire internet to train their models and are now shoving AI overviews down everyones throat. Clicks to publishers were already decreasing over the last years even without AI, but 2026 is showing what the future will look like, zero clicks from Google, because they dont care. Google got what it wanted and is now racing to AGI spending all its cash on datacenters, not caring about all the casualties along the way. Google, on its current trajectory, is truly evil in my opinion.

I'm really not a fan of regulation, but someone has to step in and have Google seperate its products, search should be free of AI overviews imo.

the era of wide spread 'global' web is over.

llm crawlers - all they do is take. they craw your content. then give it to users in distilled form in the form of 'A.I overview' or summarized content.

incentives to contribute are gone genuine original content are gone. soon enough majority of the content will be llm generated, it not already.

the original content will either be in closed communities e.g discord, mailing lists. hence 'local'

maybe video will survive but text/images - no.

We're long beyond the era of Google Search as a means for "discover new stuff" or to surface the best information on a given topic. Before the 2020s LLMs, spammers were getting the upper hand.

These days, if you have an Android phone and/or are part of the Google ecosystem, Google services overall are very useful for things like "find restaurant near me", etc or finding places to buy stuff, etc. But for intellectual pursuits or the idea "the portal to the open web", Google Search has been dead a long time.

It's been very rare for many years now that I enter anything into Google search that isn't generic information that I can find by searching Wikipedia or even using ChatGPT and I'll typically use those directly instead.

So it's rational and expected for publishers to do this. Google Search provides fewer and fewer benefits over time.

This feels like a move that might backfire, especially for the journalists at said publications. It's already harder to research niche topics than it used to be, given how much info is stuck in login only walled gardens like Discord (or things like social media posts and Google Docs shared on said services), and a lot of outlets tend to get their info from each other as well. You can't effectively investigate everything on your own, and keeping up with a huge list of other outlets and journalists on a site like Twitter would be hell. How do they plan to learn from other outlets and publishers when considering what to cover here?

Also RIP anyone who likes doing their own research I suppose. I've always found it useful to compare different publications' coverage of a trending story when trying to figure out what the true story is here, and that feels like it'll only get significantly more difficult to do if everyone ops out of Google or other search engines.

Very brave of publishers to hold their own content hostage against Google search. That's certainly one noble way to die.

Yes, publishers should opt out of Google. Everyone has a right to be forgotten.

Okay, apart from that snarky retort, what discovery mechanism are they going to use to drive people to their human-generated slop?

One step closer to Google deprecating search and just becoming an AI chatbot. By the way, most smaller publishers have already effectively left Google, they don't try to improve their SEO at all, and just promote their content on social media.

This was an entirely predictable outcome, first with summaries/snippets, and now with the AI summaries.

It was clear that eventually someone would decide to stop these parasites like google from accessing their content.

Good for them.

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