Google Accused of ‘Stealing Content’ — People CEO Calls Tech Giant a “Bad Actor”
In a bold statement at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), accused Google of unfairly using publisher content to power its AI tools — without proper compensation.
📉 Declining Traffic from Google Search
Vogel revealed that just a few years ago, Google Search drove up to 90% of People Inc.’s open web traffic. Today, that figure has dropped to the high 20% range.
He claims the reason is Google’s single web crawler, which indexes sites for both search results and AI features — meaning the same bot that once brought traffic is now allegedly scraping content to compete with publishers.
“You cannot take our content to compete with us,” Vogel emphasized.
🤖 AI Crawlers and the Fight for Fair Use
While Vogel praised OpenAI as a “good actor” for striking content deals, he criticized Google for not offering similar agreements.
People Inc. has started using Cloudflare’s AI-blocking technology to prevent unpaid scraping, which has already attracted interest from major AI companies willing to negotiate.
However, blocking Google’s crawler isn’t an option — doing so would also remove People Inc. from Google Search entirely, cutting off the remaining traffic.
📢 Industry Reactions
Janice Min, CEO of Ankler Media, echoed Vogel’s concerns, calling big tech firms “content kleptomaniacs.”
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince suggested that new regulations may be needed to ensure fair treatment of publishers in the AI era.
🌐 Why This Matters
This dispute highlights a growing tension between AI innovation and content ownership rights. As AI tools become more advanced, publishers are demanding fair compensation for the material that powers them.
Google AI content scraping, Neil Vogel People CEO, Google bad actor, AI and copyright, Cloudflare AI blocking, publisher rights, AI content theft, media industry vs Google
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