""The great patron of the internet for the last 27 years was Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google," Prince said. He claimed that in the past, for every two pages that Google crawled to inform its search engine, it would, on average, send one visitor to those sites-traffic that publishers can monetise with advertising."
"But today, he claims, Google only sends one visitor per 20 pages scanned. "What's changed is they put an AI overview at the top [of search results], and you don't have to actually click on anything in order to get your answer. You're not going to that content.""
"When asked for comment on Prince's claims, Google told Fortune that it believes its referral traffic has remained stable year on year, and that it is focused on providing more high-quality clicks (for instance, from readers who don't immediately hit the back button when landing on a source website). Google says it gives sites the option to opt out of AI crawling without hurting their referrals or ad placement."
Google is accused of abusing its search monopoly to scrape and reuse web content to train AI models without paying publishers. Cloudflare provides backend services like CDNs, cybersecurity, and DDoS mitigation, and reportedly serves a large share of leading AI companies. A claimed historical referral ratio was one visitor for every two pages crawled; currently the claim is one visitor per twenty pages scanned due to AI overviews in search results that reduce clicks. Google counters that referral traffic has remained stable and that sites can opt out of AI crawling without harming referrals or ad placement.
Read at Fortune
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