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How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

teruza.com

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Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#41

Post by airza »

gmuslera wrote: post #21

In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (lik…

What? I don’t publish my writing on the internet so google can make sloppy AI summaries. I do it because i want people to read it. Google’s decisions benefit google.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#42

Post by carlosjobim »

hermitcrab wrote: post #34

I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.

Why? If you sell something on your website, getting included in AI summaries seems to be something desirable.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#43

Post by chatmasta »

hermitcrab wrote: post #34

I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.

Yeah, this seems like a great way to ensure Google AI summarizes the second best result behind your own. And in many cases, like when the result is about your product or company or someone associated with it, that could be very bad for you. Imagine if “PayPal sucks” is rank 2 for “how to withdraw from PayPal,” but the official website blocked the AI summary so instead it comes from the “PayPal sucks” domain…

Honestly, publishers should just allow it. If the concern is lost traffic, it could be worse — the “source” link in the summary is still above all the other results on the page. If the concern is misinformation, that’s another issue but could hopefully be solved by rewriting content, submitting accuracy reports, etc.

I do think Google needs to allow publishers to opt out of AI summary without also opting out of all “snippets” (although those have the same problem of cannibalizing clicks, so presumably if you’re worried about it for the AI summary then you should be worried about it for any other snippet too).

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#45

Post by transcriptase »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #38
hermitcrab wrote: post #34

I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.

Also, little chance that down the road they'll contact you asking if you want to pay to be described more positively than your competitors. Or asking if you want to pay to remove false information that they generate which makes you look bad.

So basically automated Yelp on steroids?

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#46

Post by chatmasta »

bmau5 wrote: post #44

It feels like such an easy win-win for Google to just add citations like Perplexity does. Gives credit + link to the original source material while still offering the improved experience they're after

They do have citations. They’re just very non-obvious because they’re a 1ch width Unicode character in a little circle. (It’s the “link” symbol.) And clicking it doesn’t take you to the source, but instead opens a side panel where there is a link that will take you to the source (often it’s one of multiple sources in the panel).

And technically speaking, this citation is the first link on the results page, so you “rank” higher than all the other results. But it does take two clicks to get to your page.

They should make the citations more prominent and use the page title as anchor text. And when there’s multiple citations, the side panel should be open by default or they should put all of the citations inline as prominent links with page titles as anchor text.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#47

Post by carlosjobim »

imoverclocked wrote: post #39
gmuslera wrote: post #21

In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (lik…

IMHO, that’s a pretty entitled view of the whole process. I’ve published software under a license that disallows certain uses of it. Just because it is published doesn’t mean that it should be usable in any way that anybody wants.

You're asking a lot from law enforcement if you're giving away something for free and then demand that law enforcement make sure that people use the thing exactly as you have mandated.

It's akin to me putting up billboards and stickers around town and then demanding to decide who gets to look at them.

Same thing with online publishers. If they want to control who uses their content and how, there's a tried and true solution and it's spelled "paywall".

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#48

Post by cosmicgadget »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #25
cosmicgadget wrote: post #16

Easy: just write content that is substantive enough that a summary isn't a sufficient replacement.

People will vastly more often choose the cheap and simple slop content as they came to choose slop food from McDonald's. Was the technology that allowed McDonald's to become the dominant force in food a net positive for society?

Again so if your content has enough substance or detail to require reading in long form, a rehash of it will not suffice.

Yeah, maybe some will want to only read the imdb plot summary of Lord of the Rings. I am not sure why any author would care about those people unless they are really desperate for clicks.

Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website

#50

Post by [deleted] »

muppetman wrote: post #11

I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…

[deleted]
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