For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and ch
This summer, researchers at internet provider Cloudflare reported that “automated bot traffic has eclipsed human activity on the Internet, now generating roughly 57% of all web requests. This milestone emphasizes a seismic evolution from an Internet built for human clicks to a digital landscape now dominated by AI agents.” It’s no surprise, then, that anyone who relied on search engine inbound traffic is taking a hit. We are well and truly in the predicted “Google Zero” era. It’s also no surprise that these new numbers are altering the long-established calculus about whether outlets want to submit themselves to Google Search. Currently, Google’s offering is all-or-nothing: If you want to show up in search results, you’re also agreeing to let the company feed your content into the maw of its Gemini AI apparatus. And an increasing number of people and properties aren’t particularly interested in that arrangement.
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Last month, after AdWeek’s Mark Stenberg reported on some of the fed-up companies that were considering withdrawing their content from Google’s indexes, he received a number of social media comments from some mom-and-pop shops of the internet. The people behind a recipe blog called Inspired Taste referred to Google’s business model as a “hostage situation,” adding: “As you already know, what Google is doing to recipes is shameful.” Another webmaster piped up to say that “we have discussed blocking Google completely so we can protect our copyrighted content from AI scraping theft. The Google traffic is so small anyway because they have nuked our website”—My Sex Toy Guide dot com, in case you’re wondering!—“from their search results.” On September 15, Cloudflare will change its settings to block Google crawlers by default.
4 August 2026
