While Google was busy taking over the direction of the vast majority of web traffic, it was also laying a trap. A particularly nasty trap at that. Publishers need to publish, and ideally, they need to be seen by Google for the best chances at having a "hit" piece of content. Opting out of allowing content to be seen by Google's AI crawlers means opting out of Google entirely, which is a worse fate. It's a "pick your poison" type of situation. So far, content licensing deals haven't really worked, either. Click-through rates are still in freefall, and publishers are still trying to figure out h