[imilk]

Well besides them being abusive, the other issue is that AI overviews and answer boxes cannibalize traffic to websites, leading to less conversions for the original content producers. This is pretty well established across industries at this point:

https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/

[msgodel]

That's how people want to browse the web. If you block it you won't even get links from those. That's like blocking the search crawler.

[imilk]

...that's literally the entire point of this article. People don't want their websites being de-listed from the monopoly that controls organic traffic. At the same time they would like some control over stopping companies (in this case, the same company that controls the organic search monopoly) from scraping and repurposing their content so their the traffic to their website doesn't decrease.

Why is it such an issue that publishers and website owners want to maintain the traffic to their website so that they can continue operating as usual? Or should we all just accept every Google decision, even when those decisions result in more engagement on google.com, but 20-35% decreases in traffic to the original websites?

Also I'm going to need a citation that the vast majority of people want and get value out of AI overviews. Because that is certainly not the case from my experience.