The CEO of America's largest digital publisher just dropped a bombshell accusation against Google, calling the tech giant a 'bad actor' for weaponizing its web crawler to steal content for AI training. Neil Vogel's explosive claims at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference reveal how Google's unified crawler system traps publishers in an impossible choice between search traffic and content protection.
Google just got hit with its most damning accusation yet from a major media CEO. Neil Vogel, who runs People Inc. - the media empire behind People, Food & Wine, Better Homes & Gardens, and 40+ other brands - didn't mince words at this week's Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. He called the search giant a deliberate 'bad actor' for stealing publisher content to train its AI systems.
The explosive claim centers on Google's crawler strategy. Unlike other AI companies that use separate bots, Google deliberately uses the same web crawler for both search indexing and AI content scraping. This creates what Vogel calls an impossible trap for publishers.
'Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,' Vogel told the packed conference audience. The accusation cuts straight to the heart of the AI content wars now reshaping digital media.
The numbers tell a brutal story. Three years ago, Google Search delivered 65% of People Inc.'s traffic. Today, that's plummeted to the 'high 20s.' But here's the kicker - according to AdExchanger, Google once drove as much as 90% of the publisher's open web traffic. That's a catastrophic decline by any measure.
Yet Vogel isn't just complaining about lost traffic. 'I'm not complaining. We've grown our audience. We've grown our revenue,' he insisted. 'We're doing great. What is not right about this is: you cannot take our content to compete with us.'
The strategic genius behind Vogel's approach becomes clear when you look at his dealmaking. People Inc. has already signed a content licensing agreement with OpenAI, which Vogel praised as a 'good actor.' The difference? OpenAI uses separate crawlers and negotiates fair deals.
People Inc. has been working with Cloudflare's AI blocking solution to force AI companies into licensing negotiations. The strategy works - Vogel says 'large LLM providers' are now approaching the company for content deals, though he wouldn't name specific companies. No new deals are signed yet, but negotiations have advanced significantly since implementing the blocking technology.
