Google Extended Gets a Big Thumbs Down

Over 250 websites have opted to block Google Extended, Google's product token that blocks AI models from crawling and training on their content.

That's a 180% increase in the past month.


The move to block Google Extended includes big sites like The New York Times, Ziff Davis properties (including PC Mag and Mashable), Condé Nast (which has 22 sites, including GQ, Vogue, and Wired), Vox properties (including The Verge and NY Mag), and Yelp, a regular Google critic and even a legal adversary.

Google introduced Google Extended on Sept. 28 to allow you to block Bard, Vertex AI generative APIs, and future generations of AI models from accessing your content.

There have been numerous debates concerning whether brands and businesses should prevent any bots that crawl content used to train LLMs. So far, relatively few sites have chosen to block. The number of sites blocking Google Extended has risen dramatically in recent months because they don't want their content to make it easier for AI companies to profit and compete against them.

It looks like Google Extended isn't getting the warm welcome Google had hoped for after all. As more companies give the new product a big "thumbs down," Alphabet, Inc. might need to rethink its approach.

If following the leader is a real thing, this is only the beginning of the Google Extended revolt.

If you want to join the party, you can block Google Extended in robots.txt, but remember that it won't prevent your content from appearing in Google's Search Generative Experience or stop Google from using your stuff for training SGE.

You could completely opt out by blocking Googlebot, but you really don't want to take yourself out of Search. Instead, you can opt out of SGE overviews using the handy little "nosnippet" command. This prevents Google from showing a text snippet or video preview in the search results for a particular page. This applies to all search results, including Google web search, Google Images, and Discover. Google SGE overviews will not show content you've blocked with nosnippet, so as long as you specify this rule, you're good to go.

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