The Publisher's Sting
I was a publisher for twenty years. I knew the game. I built content, optimized it for search, and waited for Google to send me traffic. The system worked — imperfectly, but it worked. I created value, Google indexed it, and a slice of the audience found its way to my pages.
Then one day I discovered my content had been ingested by an AI engine. Nobody asked. Nobody notified me. My articles were being synthesized, regurgitated, and blended with other people's work — sometimes with a citation, usually without. The audience that used to click through to my site was getting their answer in a chat window and never arriving at all.
I know what that feels like. The sting is real.
Google Did It First
Here's the uncomfortable truth that most people in the copyright debate skip over: Google did essentially the same thing.
Google downloaded the entire internet. Every page. Every article. Every image. They indexed it, stored it on their servers, and built a trillion-dollar business on top of other people's content. The difference? They gave us a cut. Not of the revenue — of the traffic. You wrote the content, Google indexed it, and in exchange you got visitors. The deal wasn't explicit, and it wasn't fair, but it was functional.
AI changed the ratio.
Instead of sending people to your page to read the answer, the model is the answer. The user never leaves the chat window. The click-through that made the old bargain tolerable has evaporated. You're still providing the raw material, but the return on that contribution dropped from a trickle to nearly zero.
That's a legitimate grievance. I won't pretend otherwise.
The Genie's Terms
But here's where I part ways with most of the copyright crowd: I don't think we're putting this back in the bottle.
The models are trained. The data is ingested. The technology is deployed at scale across every major platform on earth. You can sue. You can lobby. You can put up robots.txt directives and hope they're honored. Some of that might yield settlements or policy changes at the margins. But the fundamental shift has already happened.
AI is the new indexer of the internet. It's not going to un-learn your content. It's not going to rewind to 2019. The question isn't whether this is fair — it's what you do now that it's real.
The DMOZ Test
For anyone who wasn't publishing in the early 2000s: DMOZ was the Open Directory Project — a human-curated index of websites that mattered enormously for early search visibility. Getting listed in DMOZ was a big deal. People submitted their sites, waited months for a human editor to review them, and celebrated when they were accepted.
Then Google happened. And suddenly, submitting to DMOZ was irrelevant. The game had moved. The traffic was coming from a new engine with new rules, and the publishers who adapted early thrived. The ones who kept submitting to DMOZ — hoping the old system would reassert itself — got left behind.
We're at that inflection point again.
AI is the new Google. Not in the sense that it works the same way, but in the sense that it has fundamentally restructured where attention flows on the internet. You can spend your energy fighting that shift, or you can spend it learning to operate in the new landscape.
Playing the New Game
I chose to play the new game. Not because I think the old rules were wrong, or because I don't feel the loss of traffic I used to earn. I chose it because I've seen this movie before.
Every major platform shift in publishing follows the same pattern:
- New technology disrupts existing distribution.
- Incumbents fight to preserve the old model.
- Early adopters learn the new rules and gain outsized returns.
- The old model becomes permanently diminished — regardless of the legal outcome.
Print fought digital. Newspapers fought blogs. Record labels fought streaming. In every case, the defenders were right about the injustice and wrong about the strategy. The world moved anyway.
The publishers who will win in the AI era are the ones who understand what AI values: structured content, authoritative sourcing, domain expertise that can't be easily synthesized from a hundred generic articles. The ones who build their presence where agents look. Who make their content machine-readable and citation-worthy. Who treat AI as the new distribution channel instead of the enemy at the gate.
What I'm Not Saying
I'm not saying copyright doesn't matter. I'm not saying AI companies shouldn't compensate creators. I'm not saying the current situation is just.
I'm saying that waiting for justice to arrive before you adapt is a losing strategy. The publishers who waited for Google to "do the right thing" in 2005 lost a decade of traffic to the ones who learned SEO. The musicians who boycotted Spotify lost market share to the ones who built playlists.
Justice and strategy are different conversations. You can pursue both simultaneously. But only one of them keeps the lights on while you wait.
The Protocol: The game has changed. The traffic model that sustained digital publishing for two decades has been restructured by AI, and no lawsuit will fully reverse it. The publishers who thrive in this era won't be the ones who fought hardest to preserve the old model — they'll be the ones who learned the new one first. Don't submit to DMOZ.
