Should I remove this blog from Google Search?

TL;DR: Recently, in the light of all the A.I. crap, I have been contemplating whether I should delist my website from all search engines, including Google.

In the past couple of months, we’ve seen quite a few articles talking about AI-rendered pages like Perplexity’s, Google’s or Arc Browser’s. Nobody is really making any effort to either properly link to sources, check on their reliability, or acknowledging their existence in the first place. They even let you know about how to stop them from scanning and digesting your content only after they’ve already done it, like receiving a warning letter explaining how to change your locks after the burglar has already left your home.

The issue isn’t just that these companies blatantly steal and monetise other people’s content without attribution; it’s also about our collective reaction to this behaviour. No one likes seeing stolen content, yet we continue to use these products and services, as if the problems will solve themselves. This dependency makes us indirectly complicit, even if we don’t realise it. We can’t afford to stop using these tools and services, so even if they act badly, we forgive them and keep using them.

Sure, when it comes to A.I., for instance, every online publisher will — understandably — block most companies’ A.I. bots from crawling their website, which is good (if it works). But the next time one of these companies will issue a press release about a new feature, a new investment, or a new weak apology, guess who will gladly be helping them spread it out?

Why aren’t more tech companies being “cancelled” for bad behaviour?

If a company keeps on doing shitty things, why should we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt? Why should we keep using it, as if there was no choice?

Let’s take the case of Perplexity for example, a company that obviously steals content, lies, doesn’t really credit its sources, and — on top of it all — ignores the robots.txt rules from websites. If I were the TechCrunch, the New York Times, and the Financial Times of the world, I would simply stop reporting on the company. Not a blip on the radar, radio silence, except for their next fuck up. And then good luck finding investors if no one talks about you. They had their chance, they blew it.

And it’s not just Perplexity. Look at Twitter. Many journalists stopped using Twitter, and for good reasons. A smaller number of them eventually deleted their accounts, and I applaud them for that. But how many of these journalists work for publishers who have stopped quoting tweets within their articles? Why give Twitter all this free publicity? Why entertain the idea that they are still relevant?

The worst offenders for this must be sports media companies: “Oh it’s annoying to embed videos and deal with copyrights, let’s just embed the tweet containing the video of the goal, and be done with it.” Screw this.

Same for articles about politics: “Oh the president said that, OK let’s put a quote here, but let’s just embed the tweet containing the quote, it will act as the source that way we don’t have to search for the link on the shitty PR website.” Laziness, bad habits, I’m not sure what to call it but in the end the result is the same: it maintains the aura of Twitter as it once was, and ultimately helps the company’s survival.

Which brings me to Google. I’m not even going to mention their shitty A.I. results. There are other reasons to stop using Google than a terrible feature nobody asked for: privacy concerns and the fact that their search result pages have been polluted with SEO crap for years come obviously to mind.

Many people — including myself — chose to use another search engine years ago, like DuckDuckGo or more recently Kagi Search. But how many of these users decided to actually have their website removed from Google? We don’t approve of what they stand for, we don’t like their product, and yet we still want to be associated with them by playing their game, and letting them index our content, assisting them in staying legitimate and maintaining their status as a leading search company.

Of course, I understand the rationale behind this. Why should a publisher deliberately stop being visible to many potential readers just out of spite for the company making the search engine the same readers rely on daily to browse the web? It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement after all: Google makes one easy to find, and one is just letting Google link to one’s website. Harmless deal right?

I understand why 99.99% of website owners stay on Google, and I understand that it is vital for many companies and people. I’ll probably keep doing the same. But what if I didn’t, you know? “Eating my own dog food” and all that?

Giving Google my address, but not the key to my house.

As far as I’m concerned, Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.

Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it. Delist the Jolly Teapot domain from Google. I can always rely on my splash page to still be findable on Google when one types my name and the words “blog” or “jolly teapot.” This would, in theory, prevent all my articles from being scanned by Google and potentially reused by all future A.I. services, while still allowing me to be on Google, via my homepage.

I’m still wondering what would be the best way to do it without ruining the user experience, and without limiting access to the RSS feed.

This may very well never happen. I’m writing this more as a rant than as an announcement. Even if it does happen, delisting this blog from Google may be completely pointless, and straight up stupid. Sure, I’d feel good for a moment sticking to my principles, and being able to say “screw them” proudly, just like I did when I deleted my LinkedIn account (still no regret on that).

But this might be more annoying to my tiny audience than anything. Not being on Bing is one thing, but being out of Google can basically mean not existing on the web.

I will take a few days to consider and explore the technical possibilities and potential consequences before making a decision. However, I must say that this idea has never been more compelling to me. I am of course open to any suggestions or feedback you may have.

UPDATE – I’ve decided to go through with this as a trial. As recommended by a reader, I’ve added <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> to the head section of pages. Thanks for the tip Rodrigo!