Cannes, France — Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., publicly accused Google of leveraging its market power by using a single webcrawler for both search and AI training. Vogel called this practice “an incredible abuse of market power,” arguing that it prevents publishers from effectively blocking Google without losing valuable search traffic.
Why it matters
Some publishers want to block crawlers to stop their content being harvested for AI models. At the same time, search traffic remains a critical metric for advertising and affiliate revenues, so blocking crawlers can carry significant revenue risks for publishers.
What Vogel says
“We can't actually block Google, because Google uses the same crawler for search as they do for AI, which is like an incredible abuse of market power,” Vogel said. He added: “We would love to do something productive with them, but we're probably heading towards more confrontation than productivity with those guys.”
Google’s response
Google said publishers can prevent their content from being used to train Gemini models through Google-Extended without affecting search results. The company also said it is testing features that let publishers opt out of appearing in or helping to ground Google’s AI search features.
Background: permission-based crawler model
People Inc., formerly Dotdash Meredith, was among the publishers that partnered with Cloudflare when Cloudflare moved to a permission-based model for AI crawlers, blocking them by default unless permission is granted. Vogel said that before blocking crawlers many publishers felt they did not need to restrict access, but that stance changed quickly once blocks were implemented: “Everybody calls, because it turns out everybody needs us. We make so much content at scale, and it's so good, and we know how much we're crawled. Scarcity is key.”
Broader picture: AI licensing deals
As one of America’s largest publishers, People Inc. has AI licensing agreements with Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft. Vogel noted there are essentially two types of publisher-AI deals: the “all-you-can-eat” arrangements like those he described with OpenAI and Meta, where partners pay and can use content freely, and a more à la carte, pay-as-you-go deal People Inc. has with Microsoft.
What to watch
Asked about the future of AI–publisher agreements, Vogel said he expects renewals. “AI needs three things: It needs a model, it needs power and it needs inputs, and we are the inputs, and we make more of the inputs than anybody, and the stuff that people are searching for happens to be what we make,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated with comment from Google.
