People Inc.’s CEO Neil Vogel said the company won’t block Google’s crawlers — not because execs don’t want to, but because they don’t want to lose out on any potential referral traffic.
In a company earnings call on Tuesday, Vogel voiced a dilemma shared by many in the publishing industry, who want to block Google’s AI crawler to have control over their content but fear it would jeopardize the Google search referrals they still depend on. Most publishers are still too dependent on Google referral traffic for their audience, content discovery and revenue to risk cutting off its crawlers.
“If we were to turn off AI, we would turn off search. And as [Tim Quinn, CFO at People Inc.] said, we are nearly on the other side of search being a material driver of value for us. But we’re not there yet. So, we’re clearly not turning this off now. But it is a tool that we can use, and it is something we will constantly be looking at,” Vogel said.
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