Archive — US — techcrunch
Google is a ‘bad actor’ says People CEO, accusing the company of stealingcontent
People CEO Neil Vogel has accused Google of unfairly using its web crawler to steal content for AI products while reducing traffic to publishers. Despite Google’s traffic drop for People Inc., Vogel is growing revenues and advocating for more publisher leverage against AI. Vogel's company employs Cloudflare's tool to block unlicensed AI crawlers, leading to potential negotiations with LLM providers for content deals.
Key points
- Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., accuses Google of using the same web crawler for both search indexing and AI content extraction.
- Three years ago, Google Search contributed to 65% of People Inc.'s traffic, now dropped to 'high 20s'.
- Despite reduced traffic from Google, People Inc. is seeing growth in audience and revenue.
- Vogel believes publishers need more power in the AI landscape and is blocking AI crawlers to encourage licensing agreements.
- People Inc. uses Cloudflare's solution to prevent unauthorized AI access, with potential negotiations with large LLM providers ongoing.
- Blocking Google's crawler isn't viable as it would mean losing overall search traffic, which is still significant.
Why it matters
- This situation reflects broader tensions between content creators and tech giants over content use in AI.
- Historically, publishers have faced similar challenges with the rise of digital media platforms taking their content without fair compensation.
- In 2025, the demand for fair compensation in the publishing industry undoubtably increased as AI began to dominate content creation and aggregation.
Vogel's accusations against Google highlight a pivotal struggle for publishers' rights in the AI era, demonstrating an urgent need for fair practices as tech companies increasingly utilize content without adequate compensation.