[spyder]

That's one of the reasons more and more sites are starting to require sign-up to continue reading the article. So only provide a summary of your article to search engines and users can access the rest by the annoying sign up (or captcha). But that also means less of the content is searchable so the summary you provide for search engines has to be really good (maybe even AI can help to produce this summary).

And it's probably not just big companies we will have to worry about because at least they can be somewhat regulated and they are in the public eye. The other "threat" in the future is the "distributed" AI when people can run their own personal AI assistants that could collect information for them by any means (singing up to to websites, e-mailing, calling people, talking to other AI agents) and with filtering out ads and sponsored content. At that point probably everything worthwhile will be paywalled and the "SEO" game will be to convince/trick these AIs to sing up / pay for your content.

[Nathanba]

That's a very positive way to look at it: Use the AI for your own benefit to generate a summary but the full information is hidden behind a signin/paywall. Of course whether this ends up being better for humanity is the question. On the other hand, maybe Google should be paying people for high quality, trainable content.

[nicbou]

I have no paywall by design. It's a core principle behind the website I run. I can cover the bills through affiliate links for services I actually recommend. However those are stripped by whoever uses my content for their own benefit, including Google.