People Inc. CEO accuses Google of abusing its market power

People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel accused Google of abusing its market power by using the same crawler for both search and AI. While some publishers want to block crawlers to protect their content from getting swept up by AI models, search traffic remains a key metric for advertising and affiliate revenue. "We can't actually block Google, because Google uses the same crawler for search as they do for AI, which is like an incredible abuse of market power," Vogel said. "We would love to do something productive with them, but we're probably heading towards more confrontation than productivity with those guys," he said.