People Inc. CEO Labels Google an ‘Intentional Bad Actor’ Over AI Content Scraping

Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc., a leading U.S. digital and print publisher, has publicly accused Google of being an ‘intentional bad actor’ for allegedly stealing content to fuel its AI products. Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Vogel asserted that Google’s use of a single crawler for both search indexing and AI training constitutes unfair practice, allowing the tech giant to exploit publisher content without proper compensation.

Vogel highlighted a significant drop in Google Search traffic to People Inc.’s network of over 40 brands, including People and Food & Wine, from 65% to the ‘high 20s’ over the past three years. While acknowledging his company’s continued growth, he emphasized, ‘You cannot take our content to compete with us.’

People Inc. has actively sought to block AI crawlers from other large language model (LLM) providers, leveraging Cloudflare’s solutions, which has led to content deals, including one with OpenAI. However, Vogel explained that blocking Google’s crawler is not an option as it would also prevent their sites from being indexed in Google Search, cutting off critical traffic. This forces publishers into a predicament, leading Vogel to declare, ‘They know this, and they’re not splitting their crawler. So they are an intentional bad actor here.’

The sentiment was echoed by Janice Min, CEO of Ankler Media, who called Big Tech companies ‘content kleptomaniacs.’ Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, who was also on the panel, predicted that Google would be compelled to pay content creators for their data within the next year, possibly driven by new regulations.

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