Breaking

People Inc. CEO Calls Google's Unified Crawler an Abuse of Market Power

June 23, 2026 at 07:55 EDT

Policy & Regulation
Sales & Business

Neil Vogel, CEO of US media giant People Inc., on June 23, 2026, criticized Google at an event in Cannes, France, for using the same web crawler for both search indexing and AI training, calling it an "incredible abuse of market power."

June 23 · Cannes · People Inc.

"We Can't Block Google": A Publisher's Crawler Trap

CEO Neil Vogel says Google uses a single crawler for both search and AI — so blocking AI scraping means losing search visibility too. He calls it "an incredible abuse of market power."

70%

of top keywords where its articles rank high now show an AI summary

+8%

Q1 2026 digital revenue YoY, rising to $253M

~$15M

planned 2026 spend on its ad-tech antitrust suit vs Google

Google's Share of People Inc. Traffic

As AI Overviews spread, the click-through flow halved in two years.

55%

Q1 2024

→

25%

Q1 2026

The Crawler Trap

One crawler, two jobs

Google feeds both Search and AI from the same bot.

→

Block AI =

Blocking AI scraping also drops you from Search.

→

No leverage

Unlike OpenAI, Meta & Microsoft, Google pays nothing.

The Workaround Works

Permission-based blocking turned scarcity into leverage — flat-rate licensing deals with OpenAI & Meta, pay-as-you-go with Microsoft. "When AI crawlers are blocked, the calls come in."

The Exception

Google alone refuses to split search and AI crawlers. Disentangling them is hard by design — so blocking would hurt both sides, leaving publishers as "Google's serfs."

Continue reading

The rest of this article is for AI News Blitz readers. Choose an option below to keep reading.