Google’s War Dogs Mistake

A business only succeeds if the ones who are helping you succeed are fairly treated. The interesting thing about fairness in a business setup is that your sense of responsibility becomes even greater towards the people whose contribution may not look direct or significant, but whose contribution is foundational to your success.

The fundamental mistake that Google is making is that they are choosing to look the other way whilst continuing their journey of becoming an AI search engine. The individual bloggers whose unique content formed the foundation of millions of Google search pages appear to have been ignored, as traffic to their blogs through Google has plummeted since Google took the call to put the AI summary above the blue links.

People went onto Google, entered their queries and clicked on the blue links, which brought traffic to bloggers and website owners. In return, bloggers and website owners worked on their web content for many years, producing quality content and trying to rise in Google rankings.

There was a simple and fair exchange: bloggers gave Google quality and unique content to build its search engine, and Google gave those bloggers traffic. Now the AI summary on the top appears to have usurped the blue links, while continuing to build its answers from the unique content created by those same people. I think that small exchange has been broken.

It reminds me of the movie War Dogs. I think it was based on a true story. They were selling weapons to the US government, and I think they got hold of some illegal weapons somewhere and got workers to package them so they did not look illegal. Where they eventually got caught was that they did not pay the workers who were packaging them. There was a relatively small price to pay to look after those people, but they chose to ignore them. That small mistake eventually brought the whole thing down.

I find that story extraordinarily insightful because the people doing the packaging may not have looked like the most important people in the entire operation. They may not have been in a position to raise their voices together or appear to be making the largest direct contribution. But their contribution was still part of the foundation on which the entire operation depended. The mistake was thinking that because their individual position looked small, they could simply be ignored.

I think that is exactly where the War Dogs story connects with Google. The average blogger, such as myself, may not look particularly significant to Google individually. One blogger losing traffic may not appear capable of affecting a company of Google’s size. Thousands or millions of those individual pieces of content, however, were what allowed Google to create millions of useful search pages in the first place.

I think humanity runs on fairness. The everyday user of Google may not immediately be thinking about where the content in an AI summary actually came from. At the moment, perhaps the wow factor of the AI summary is still strong. But as that wow factor begins to wane, people may begin to realise that the original content created by bloggers and website owners is what made those summaries possible in the first place.

Eventually, people may begin to feel that Google is not being entirely fair to the original content creators. The element of unfairness may begin to rise in the consciousness of the average user. They may first begin to abandon the AI summary, and some may eventually begin to abandon Google itself.

They may simply say, “You know what? If I want a summary, why should I go to Google? I should go to ChatGPT.” ChatGPT works on a similar principle of taking material created by others and producing a summary, but I think it appears to be in a better position than Google in this particular AI saga. Google had a silent pact, if you may, with bloggers and website owners: they produced quality content and optimised it for Google, and Google gave them search traffic in return. Google appears to have chosen to break that exchange, whereas ChatGPT never had that exchange with bloggers in the first place.

That is why Google may eventually appear to be the bigger villain between the two.