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Comment by nathanyz | Hacker News Reader

The thing that he doesn't mention is that as soon as they do something legislatively and announce routes there, etc.....well Google just won't crawl those sites. It turns into a game of whether you would like 0 traffic from Google, or allow them to use your content both for search results and AI summaries.

Google is the bringer of traffic and if you want it, then you play by their rules. I don't like that the web is in that position, but here we are.

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I think it gets tricky with AI overviews. Some sites are saying they have lost the majority of their traffic (some losing more than 90%). Many of those make money from ads (often by google).

Some sites don't get enough traffic from google to sustain their business where they previously did. Wholesale blocking google crawlers doesn't seem like a risky move for them.

It makes me wonder if that is a trend? Will more sites go to 'google zero'?

Doesn't this also cannibalize Google's ad revenue?

To some extent, yes. I speculate that is why they are sometimes not putting the AI overview first.

They do have ads in search though. I guess it depends on how much more money they make from people spending more time not leaving google vs showing you display ads on other sites.

Not really because most of the links in current AI overviews for many queries keep you in the Google ecosystem, such as links to Google Business profiles on Google Maps. And Google has recently changed Google Business profiles to make outbound website links less prominent compared to the paid features on that platform.

Ah yeah. Also those would likely bill at a higher eCPM than AdSense impressions.

Exactly, since they can bill those as conversions (like phone calls, bookings, reservations, etc) rather than simply website visits

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