Google is a ‘Bad Actor,’ Says People CEO, Accusing the Company of Stealing Content

The CEO of People Inc., the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S., has accused Google of being a bad actor for crawling its websites to support the tech giant’s AI products.

Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), a publisher that operates over 40 brands, including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, Allrecipes, and others, said Google is not playing fairly. He accused the search giant of using the same crawler to index websites for Google Search and to support its AI features, effectively “stealing” the publisher’s content.

“Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,” Vogel stated at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week.

Vogel noted that, three years ago, Google Search accounted for about 65% of People Inc.’s traffic, but that has since dropped to the “high 20s.” Vogel shared even more alarming figures with AdExchanger, revealing that Google’s traffic once accounted for as much as 90% of People Inc.’s traffic from the open web.

“I’m not complaining. We’ve grown our audience. We’ve grown our revenue,” Vogel said during his conference address. “We’re doing great. What is not right about this is: You cannot take our content to compete with us.”

Vogel believes that publishers need more leverage in the age of AI, which is why he feels blocking AI crawlers — automated programs that scan websites to train AI systems — is necessary. This would force companies like Google to negotiate content deals. His company has, for instance, entered a deal with OpenAI, which Vogel described as a “good actor.”

People Inc. has been using Cloudflare’s latest solution to block AI crawlers that do not pay, prompting AI companies to approach the publisher with potential content deals. While Vogel did not name the companies involved, he confirmed that these were “large LLM providers”. No deals have been finalized yet, but Vogel said the company is “much further along” than before adopting the crawler-blocking solution.

However, Vogel pointed out that Google’s crawler cannot be blocked without also preventing the publisher’s websites from being indexed on Google Search, effectively cutting off the 20%-ish of traffic that Google still provides.

“They know this, and they’re not splitting their crawler. So they are an intentional bad actor here,” Vogel declared.

Janice Min, CEO and editor-in-chief at Ankler Media, also agreed, calling big tech companies like Google and Meta longtime “content kleptomaniacs.”

“I don’t see the benefit to us in partnering with any AI company right now,” Min said, adding that her company blocks AI crawlers.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, whose company offers the AI-blocking solution, believes things may change for the AI companies in the future, potentially prompted by new regulations.

Prince also questioned whether fighting the AI companies using legal solutions like copyright law, which was created for a pre-AI world, is the right approach.

“I think that it’s a fool’s errand to go down that path, because, in copyright law, typically, the more derivative something is, the more it’s protected under fair use… What these AI companies are doing is they’re actually creating derivatives,” said Prince. “And so if you look at the best-case law that’s come out so far, it’s actually said that the use by Anthropic and others — the reason Anthropic settled recently with all the book publishers for $1.5 billion — was for them to be able to preserve the positive copyright ruling that they got.”

Prince also stated that “everything that’s wrong with the world today is, at some level, Google’s fault,” arguing that the search giant has taught publishers to value traffic over original content creation, which led to publishers like BuzzFeed writing content purely for clicks.

Still, Prince admitted that Google finds itself in a tough spot from a competitive standpoint.

“Internally, they’re having massive fights about what they do, and my prediction is that, by this time next year, Google will be paying content creators for crawling their content and taking it and putting it in AI models,” he said.

News Sources:

https://www.iac.com/business-management/neil-vogel

https://conferences.fortune.com/event/brainstorm-tech-2025/home

https://www.adexchanger.com/publishers/people-inc-has-a-new-name-but-it-still-faces-the-same-old-google-search-traffic-drought/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-ankler/