this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 21 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 15 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

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 10 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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 2 points 10 hours 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 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 17 hours ago

Alternatively, you use the cloudflare money to sue the monopoly to decouple search and all other products, since blocking the AI trawlers shouldn't have any measurable impact in search rankings