How to Stop Google from AI-Summarising Your Website

Google even put the AI snippet above their ads, so you know how bad it stings.

IMO a LLM is just a superior technology to a search engine in that it can understand vague questions, collate information and translate from other languages. In a lot of cases what I want isn't to find a particular page but to obtain information, and a LLM gets closer to that ideal.

It's nowhere near perfect yet but I won't be surprised if search engines go extinct in a decade or so.

I suspect that they're hoping to "win" the AI war, get a monopoly, and then enshittify the whole thing. Good luck with that.

People will still spend the same amount of money to purchase goods and services. Advertisers will be willing to spend money to capture that demand.

Having their own websites is an optional part. It can also happen via Google Merchant Center, APIs, AI Agents, MCP servers, or other platforms.

I believe there will be fewer clicks going to the open web. But Google can simply charger a higher CPC for each click since the conversion rate is higher if a users clicks to buy after a 20 minute chat vs if a user clicks on an ad during every second or third Google search.

They won an award for the paper, and the example they given was a "holiday" search, where a hotel inserted their name, and an airline company wedged themselves as the best way to go there.

If I can find it again, I'll print and stick its link all over walls to make sure everybody knows what Google is up to.

Edit: Found it!

[0]: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

Look at the reason, and get mad to the correct people.

It might be the archive themselves, but just be sure.

Why would you NOT want internet archive to scrape your website? (Im Clueless - thank you)

In all honestly, if you're hosting it on the internet, why is this a problem? If you didn't want it to backed up, why is it publicly accessible at all? I'm glad the internet archive will keep hosting this content even when the original is long gone.

Let's say I'd read your website and wanted to look it up one day in the far future, only to find many years later the domain had expired, I'd be damn glad at least one organization had kept it readable.

>Good! It's literally the Internet Archive and you published it on the internet. That was your choice.

>As a general rule, people shouldn't get to remove things from the historical record.

>Sometimes we make exceptions for things that were unlawful to publish in the first place -- e.g. defamation, national secrets, certain types of obscene photos -- where there's a larger harm otherwise.

>But if you make someone public, you make it public. I'm sorry you seem to at least partially regret that decision, but as a general rule, it's bad for humanity to allow people to erase things from what are now historical records we want to preserve.

But it's my content - it's not your content. I don't regret my decision, anything I really don't want public is behind a login. The website is still there, still getting crawled.

What really upsets me the MOST though is IA won't even reply to my requests to tell me "We're not going to remove it" - your reply (I am assuming from your wording you have some relationship with them, apologies if that's not the case) is the only information I've got! (Thanks)

[Note reply was from user crazygringo but I can't find it now, almost like they... removed it? It was public though and I'm SURE they won't mind me archiving it here for them.]

Try using robots.txt to get it removed or excluded from The Internet Archive. The organization went back and forth on respecting robots.txt a couple of times, but it started respecting it (again) some years ago.

Several years ago I was also frustrated by its refusal to remove some content taken from a site I owned, but later the change to follow robots.txt was implemented (and my site was removed).

The FAQ has more information on how this works (there may be caveats). [1]

https://support.archive-it.org/hc/en-us/articles/208001096-R...

Perhaps the answer for me is to put my content behind a login. A sad future for the web.

Part of the reason for writing is to cultivate an audience, to bring like-minded people together.

Letting a middleman wedge itself between you and your reader damages the ability and does NOT benefit the writer. If the writer wanted an LLM summary, they always have the option to generate it themselves. But y'know what? Most writers don't. Because they don't want LLM summaries.

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Also, LLMs have been known to introduce biases into their output. Just yesterday somebody said they used an LLM for translation and it silently removed entire paragraphs because they triggered some filters. I for one don't want a machine which pretends to be impartial to pretend to "summarize" my opinions when in fact it's presenting a weaker version.

The best way to discredit an idea is not to argue against it, but to argue for it poorly.

Or asking if you want to pay to remove false information that they generate which makes you look bad.

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).

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.

> Is it bad for content owners? Yes, because people won't visit your pages any longer, affecting your ad revenue.

So it is actually better for the both sides. One is getting hurt in this transition process.