I disagree. Searches are not googles main focus these days. Blocking their crawlers will just make the AI searches better - exactly what google want
Comment on Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I mean, with a company as large as cloudflare. I think they could /easily/ strong-arm this move by making blocking google crawlers a default setting on websites. The amount of traffic drop alone from that would make google think twice about the whole ordeal. And people who care about the google search indexers can turn them on again which will allow indexing again. but a default block would cause a lot of disruption google side and many people I don’t think would go in and fix the setting till later on down the road.
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 3 days ago
sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Exactly. It’s not like google is the only indexer out there. And if this cuts into their search dominance, so much the better.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Cloudflare’s customers probably wouldn’t be on board with that. Google’s properties provide a tonne of traffic to businesses. Doing anything to put that in jeopardy would probably have many of Cloudflare’s customers looking for a new provider.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Google used to provide a ton of traffic, they hoard it all themselves now through AI and summaries of content. Eventually the balance of cost/benefit will shift and Google will suddenly see itself rejected from scraping, furthering the product deathspiral.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 days ago
content is only 1 category of website
ecommerce drives all the advertising that funds content… it’s a much bigger market, and they don’t care about content scraping as long as you buy their product
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And the long term plan there is to strangle sites and take %100 of the adrev spend for themselves since users won’t ever leave the Google site. Either way Google as a search engine enters a death spiral, it’s already bleeding users.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
it would need to be advertised as a change and have it as a setting that had to be set yea, just have it default blocking abusive trackers, having Google bot or whatever it’s crawler name is as on there, with a toggle to allow it again