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People Inc. CEO Calls Google's Dual-Use AI Crawler a Market-Power Abuse

June 23, 2026 at 07:35 EDT

Policy & Regulation
Sales & Business
AI Agents

People Inc. chief executive Neil Vogel argued that publishers can block most AI crawlers but not Google's, because the company uses the same crawler for both search and AI — calling it "an incredible abuse of market power." The remarks were made on June 23, 2026, at Axios's "AxiosHouse" event, where Vogel said publishers "can't actually block Google, because Google uses the same crawler for search as they do for AI." He made a nearly identical case at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech in September 2025, making this a recurring point.

People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel · AxiosHouse

"We can't block Google" — and that, publishers say, is an abuse of market power

Google uses the same crawler for search and for AI, so refusing AI use also kills search traffic. As AI answers spread and "zero-click" grows, publisher traffic from Google has collapsed.

Google Search share of one publisher's traffic

90%

~5 years
ago

65%

~3 years
ago

~28%

Now
(high 20s)

In roughly five years, Google's share of traffic fell from 90% to the high 20s — over a third of where it was.

40+

People Inc. brands, incl. People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure

$1.5B

Anthropic's settlement with book publishers over content

AI licensing deals struck — with OpenAI and Microsoft

The bind: one crawler, two uses

Other AI crawlers

Can be blocked via Cloudflare

→

Licensing deals

Publishers get paid

Google's unified crawler

Search + AI in one

→

Block AI = lose search

No payment, no opt-out

The argument

"Google is an intentional bad actor… we can't actually block Google. I would love to be their partner here, but they're not heading in that direction."

Cloudflare's CEO is pressing UK regulators to unbundle Google's search and AI crawlers. Google declined to comment.

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