Publishers consider opting out of Google as search traffic declines | Hacker News Reader

Publishers consider opting out of Google as search traffic declines

niemanlab.org

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.

I'm with you in spirit but publishers are hardly blameless. SEO optimization and framework bloat made internet browsing downright unpleasant since the late 2000s.

Google is delivering a solution to a problem they [indirectly?] created.

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.

You'll need something to replace it first. And so many things depend on Google's monopoly, hell, you can't pay taxes in my country without Google's monopoly.

At this point, this will simply destroy publishers' business entirely. Which won't stop some of them, but the rest will see what happens and run back to Google.

(needed for identification to fill out online taxes which is the only option left)

How in the (excuse my French) f*ck is your government allowing google to login to do your taxes?? And it is the ONLY option??? I’m flabbergasted, honestly.

It's not Google login, it's the Google authenticator being the only practical 2-factor option to login to government services (still annoying, but less so than trying to get one of those calculators that cost 30 euros and haven't been in stock since COVID)

There's lots of apps that do TOTP, if that's what you're using it for.

Absolutely. Even Apple Passwords does it now (but also a LOT of other apps, including free and open-source ones). google is definitely NOT a dependency here.

Even before the onset of AI, publishers steal copyrighted work from writers and reporters and then turn it into human-generated slop and charge you money for the privilege of being misinformed.

Closed communities are not a viable alternative as their content has an even lower signal-to-noise ratio than AI-generated summaries. I have spent hours trying to piece together a reasonable set of answers from shitty searches on various forums and mailing lists. I'll take AI summaries any day over the crap that you can get from forums.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have evidence for this?

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

It's either that or let Google strangle them.

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?

Google is not discovery mechanism for them anymore. They amount to free labor for Google. Basically, there are two futures: a.) they do free labor for google without being discoverable through them b.) they are not discoverable on google without providing free data to google.

Good points. On item B. In the natural experiment of AI getting between the information consumer and the information provider, it appears that even providing free data to Google, they're still not discoverable. What is the alternative mechanism for discovery? Do they flood the world with even more advertising as a way of forcing discovery onto consumers?

I am not publisher, I dont know or see where the things are going. Personally, I realized I am not using google like I used to anyway, stuff I actually use comes from a recommemdation on a blog I already follow, podcast or something. Kind of unintentional old school way, because google returns less relevant results.

In both a. and b., they are not discoverable through google. So, not provinding free labor makes sense. Either they find a new channel or stop publishing ... but if they are NOT on google, people may end up lookin for stuff elsewhere. If they are on google, they are guaranteed to not find them

Those are good examples of serendipitous discovery. But what if you have a targeted need? For example, how to drive a woodchuck away from your yard before it causes more damage, how do you know when DIY solutions are not working, and it's time to call a professional? What's a good environment for ever-bearing strawberries? You know, asking for a friend.

Imo, we will kind of regress. If it was described in previous materials, llm will output it reasonably reliably. If it was not in the old data, it will tell you some bullshit. And you will have to hope serendipitous discovery will get you there anyway.

I like the era of open internet where people who knew stuff had blogs you could find and read. That era ended when google started to require a lot of SEO to just find things. It will be over and that is it.

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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