CANNES, France — People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel has accused Google of misusing its market power by employing the same web crawler for both search and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Vogel stated, "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." He expressed a desire for productive engagement with Google but indicated that the relationship may lead to confrontation instead. Google has not yet responded to requests for comment.
People Inc., previously known as Dotdash Meredith, has partnered with Cloudflare to implement a permission-based model for AI crawlers, which blocks them from scraping content by default. Vogel noted that prior to this change, many publishers believed they did not need to block crawlers, but once they did, there was a surge of interest from companies needing their content.
As one of the largest publishers in the U.S., People Inc. has AI licensing agreements with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. Vogel differentiated between two types of AI publisher deals: an all-you-can-eat model with OpenAI and Meta, and a more flexible pay-as-you-go arrangement with Microsoft. He anticipates that future AI-publisher deals will likely be renewed, emphasizing the importance of content as a critical input for AI models.