ADWEEK Advantage is part of a series where every month, our top editors interpret what happened in each vertical, and what it means for the future.
More cracks are emerging in Google’s search empire.
Now, some of the empire’s very subjects—publishers—are finally turning their back on Google, a once unimaginable move, as ADWEEK reported last month.
Beginning September 15, Cloudflare’s site security software, used by publishers including Financial Times, Condé Nast, and The Atlantic, will default to blocking crawlers that scrape for both search indexing and AI training for new publishers and those using its free tier. Google and others like Bing fit the description. Along with Cloudflare, USA Today and creator network Beehiiv also told ADWEEK they were preparing to delist Google.
In doing so, publishers who once had no real choice but to let Google’s crawlers in are now confronted with a brutal dilemma: keep training AI assistants that are promising limited audiences, or disappear from the Search engine and cut off a giant source of traffic in the process.
Also this month, Google touted its ballooning AI investment, a position that cannibalizes its bread-and-butter search business, as ADWEEK reported.
The tech giant posted negative free cash flow for the first time in the company’s history—about $5.9 billion in the red—as AI investment outran the cash. The company’s Search and ads business is still growing at 17%, reaching $63.3 billion. But the AI buildout is eating into some of that money-making arm.
In the short term: Some creators adapt to AI search
While some publishers are rethinking their commitment to Google search, some creators are adapting their strategies to appear in AI-fuelled results more often, as I covered a few weeks ago.
Andrew Polo gave an interview with HealthCentral about his experience with eczema, and then began being surfaced in ChatGPT queries about the skin condition. After ChatGPT began citing him as an eczema creator, he saw a 50% increase in inbound brand inquiries and a modest lift in his social following, an outcome his team called accidental but a win.
