Personal finance platform WalletHub says it has blocked Google and several other search engines from crawling more than 40,000 of its web pages, citing ongoing issues with artificial intelligence-fueled plagiarism and content theft.
In a statement emailed to The Desk this week, WalletHub accused Google and other developers of AI-powered search tools of “anticompetitive behavior” by scraping information from their websites while depriving publishers of traffic and revenue needed to financially support their operations.
As a result, WalletHub says it has blocked search engine crawlers used by Google and others from indexing 40,000 pages. Moving forward, those pages will only be available to those who sign up for a free WalletHub account.
“The decision to prevent Google and other AI bots from accessing tens of thousands of WalletHub pages is not one we took lightly,” said WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou. “We’ve spent the past couple of years exhausting every available alternative, but it’s impossible to invest in content when theft is allowed.”
Papadimitriou accused Google of abandoning its founding mission of organizing information and instead turning to “stealing it,” breaking what he called an “implied contract” between search engines and publishers. He encouraged other publications to draw inspiration from WalletHub by “starving Google and the other AI bots of oxygen.”
“Imagine you’re a restaurant owner, and you get approached by the mafia,” he said. “That’s how Google behaves, even after being declared a monopoly. I’ve had enough, personally, so I’m taking my proverbial ball home.”
To bolster its case, WalletHub released new survey data highlighting widespread public skepticism about AI’s role in information delivery. The report said 62 percent of surveyed Americans expressed the belief that content scraping by AI developers should be illegal unless they pay for the privilege, and nearly 90 percent of Americans feel that prominent labels should be affixed to AI-generated content online.
The move comes amid intensifying legal and regulatory scrutiny of AI companies’ use of copyrighted material. One of the biggest lawsuits involves the New York Times, which is suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI after the newspaper said its content was improperly used to train the conversational chatbot.
