After 18 months of soul searching, we have decided to take a very public stance on Google.
This is a long story about our history with Google, how we make money and what they have done to us as independent content creators. Some of it is rather niche, but if you've ever wanted to understand how websites make money, this is it. If you want to skip around, use the links in the right sidebar.
Currently, over 91.8% of advertising dollars go to the top 25 media properties in the world. Less than 9% of the rest goes to the open web, which is where we have sat for the last decade.
If there was a Bed Bath and Beyond of the Internet, we're the Beyond section. We're the fart jokes of the Internet, something slightly better than Reddit, ballerina tradwives, fringe culture and cat videos. (We're all not liberal, but yeah, you get my drift. We're the weird Internet.)
But as weird as we are, we are the freest to speak, the least traditional, the most expressive, because we aren't beholden to anyone but ourselves. And the real Internet is dying.
The stuff about advertising no one really thinks about
It took me a really long time to figure out how to explain programmatic advertising and adtech to my mom. Like, a REALLY long time.
Many of us see the ads presented on websites, but no one realizes there is an actual supply chain on how that ad gets to you, through an invisible layer of technology platforms. Currently, Google is on trial for this.
In the past 20 years that I have worked in media, first as a reporter and then editor for outlets like TIME and Gawker, and then the past 10 running Map Happy as my own entity, I really do believe Google has too much power in advertising, search and AI, given that all of its products are embedded within each other, and that this is to the detriment to a healthy and thriving media ecosystem.
Google is the dominant player in advertising, controlling everything. Websites, like ours, make money off display advertising and other revenue streams. These ads shown to you (being spammed to you) are mostly controlled by Google, but are essential to how we stay afloat.
In adtech, imagine the flow of money like water pressure in a house. Depending on the plumbing set up, the water pressure can be weak-or strong-by the time it reaches the publisher.
In an ideal world, publishers are able to sell at Ralph Lauren prices at all times. In the real world, not everything gets sold, and some of that inventory makes it to HomeGoods, which is resold at a fraction of the cost.
This is called programmatic advertising, and initially it was designed to make advertising efficient. It is designed as an auction-based style of advertising bidding, where the right bid wins at the right time.
But as the technology has matured over the last ten years or so, it is clear that Google owns the casino, and the hand in this case.
For some publishers, it is the most reliable form of revenue they have, as brand sponsorships and collaborations are often susceptible to market conditions (ie. tariffs) and aren't our most reliable form of income.
I'd like to clarify: Though I am not an adtech specialist by any means, I do understand the programmatic industry, from DSPs, SSPs, the open exchange, the difference between PG and PMP deals, and the open market.
It is a core part of the revenue in my business, which means that I must understand the difference between what Magnite does and what the Trade Desk does when push comes to shove.
For bandwidth and cost reasons, over the years, we have found it easier to employ an adtech company to implement, execute and run the display ads on our site. We have worked with almost all of them, and even took it in-house! for a brief spell of time.
Google has become such the dominant adtech player in the space over the years, that anytime we switched partners, there was an understood requirement they needed to be a Google Certified Publishing partner.
Throughout the years, the proportion of our revenue coming from programmatic has fluctuated dramatically, from being our saving grace to destroying our business.
Google controls a lot of other things too
In actuality, Google controls everything. Google controls the adtech servers, the distribution system (search), and AI Overviews. Essentially, they own every single part of the pipeline, including how much inventory (ie. traffic) we are able to offer to advertisers.
Let me explain: AI Overviews reduce traffic by at least 34.5%. Real world estimates are around 69%, which is very close to the 64% traffic drop that we saw. The IAB estimates this can go up to as much as 90%.
This year, Google confirmed to us in-person that it scrapes publishers for the content it puts into AI Overviews, while at the same time reducing traffic and revenue. ("You're high-quality content," they told us.)
These products are so interwoven that if we want to opt out of our content being trained for the AI Overviews, it would mean being excluded from Google Search. This would destroy our business, and is akin to being having our content being held at gunpoint without being compensated.
Here is an actual screenshot from our Cloudflare/CDN dashboard showing how much we are scraped on a daily basis:
Our conversations with Google over the past year
The bulk of this, for us, started 18 months ago, or a year and half ago. In May 2024, Google unveiled AI Overviews, which was the equivalent of the Titanic hitting the iceberg.
Prior to May 2024, approximately 80% of our traffic came from Google. After the introduction of AI Overviews was introduced, we lost 64% of our inventory from which we still have not been able to recover in full, only making modest gains.
(In order to return where we were, we would have to 4x our current traffic. This also means we have been bleeding money by 51.2% over the last year and a half. By my estimate, I personally have lost in the tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months.)
Around the same time, our advertising agency contacts at WPP, Dentsu, and IPG confirmed to me in meetings they were seeing reduced programmatic inventory across the board, and it was hitting publishers on an industry-wide level.
While this was all happening, our adtech agency notified us AI bots were scraping our site. In response, we updated robots.txt, a well-known protocol to control scraping and indexing, to exclude the bots. I personally did this myself, to make sure it was done correctly.
However, our CDN and tracking systems report the bots still repeatedly violate instructions to exclude our content from training the LLMs.
In January 2025, during a popular travel media conference, I reconnected with a few publisher colleagues that I have worked alongside for years, including ThePlanetD, and Nomadic Matt, who confessed to me that they were shutting down because of how much traffic and money they had lost.
They had already fired all of their employees at this point. These were people I had worked alongside for almost a decade. Like me, they had invested their life savings into their sites.
I just remember tossing back drink after drink in solidarity.
Though our traffic was down, I had been able to keep the site alive by aggressively cutting costs. I canceled our coworking office, started working from home, and was very aggressive about pursuing brand deals, so more or less was able to get through for a little bit longer than some of my other fellow publishers. However, I knew the loss of our traffic from AI Overviews had to be dealt with.
It wasn't until March 2025 that I finally managed to reach Jennifer Phan on the Google Publisher Relations team, and John Mueller and Danny Sullivan from search marketing.
Through a series of discussions, we were eventually invited to attend a publisher meet up at Google HQ (at their St. John's Terminal office) in New York City in June 2025. Around the same time, Google requested us to sign a marketing release and to tell the story of how Google had impacted our business.
The questions were clearly formatted in a way that would frame Google in a positive light.
At current publication, over 180 publishers are listed on Google for Publishers (some of whom, ironically, have gone out of business). Though it was never explicitly stated, it seem implied that this was the price for having access to Google's representatives.
Google paid for our flights, hotel, and provided us with something like $2000 in Lyft credits (all of which expired in three days or something), alongside 14 other publishers. I was allowed to attend the publisher gathering, though I hadn't signed the marketing release.
The first day was pretty uneventful, while we were presented with a TEDx-style talk, and basic information about getting established on YouTube. Most of us were frustrated at this point, as we had all taken time away from our businesses, most of us to figure out our traffic drops, while being presented with what essentially a PR stunt.
On the second day, we were shoved into a conference room and unequivocally told that this particular session was off-the-record (with no prior agreement from any of us).
In a nutshell, we were told not to expect our traffic to come back, to diversify revenue sources, and that if we chose not to train our content on Google's LLMs, it could impact us in Google Search.
To drive the point home, publishers were asked to present strategies that was going well in their business, essentially sending the message that we'd have to be there for each other, as Google would not be able to provide further assistance.
(I was told that this was a good publisher meetup, and in previous meetups, media owners had cried in their conference rooms.)
After the event, I signed the marketing release, but still felt uneasy about submitting our story. I was afraid that if I spoke out publicly against Google, it would destroy our relationship with them. Given how dependent our business is on Google, this was not an option.
However, as time has progressed, it has become increasingly clear Google is not willing to work with independent publishers, most of us who are small business owners, and do not have the resources publishers like The New York Times would have. Some of these larger entities have been able to eke out licensing agreements in a concilitary gesture.
I eventually backtracked and told Google that I could not submit a story testifying to how Google helped our business, and in fact, communicated that the changes they made had decimated us as a small business.
Jennifer Phan, the organizer, told me repeatedly that she had no insight to the rest of the company's operations, and that the Google for Publishers team was simply a marketing function under their AdSense department.
Map Happy is my business and I own it.
This site has been my lifeblood for the last 10 years.
Initially, as a late 20-something, I invested $20,000 of my own money into the site (that was all I had). Over the years, that number has grown to approximately $80,000-100,000 I have put into the business over its lifetime.
Beyond that, we have taken very little outside investment. Sometimes, we have raised money through family and friends, but the people that support this site are a small, dedicated tight knit group. I retain full ownership over this company and my entire life savings, to date, has been invested into this company.
That does not include the personal sacrifices that come with being a small business owner, the long sleepless nights, the more-than-occasional 15-hour workday 😬 but we've been able to support meaningful projects throughout our industry in ways that I could have not under other circumstances.
Though our company has ranged in size over the years, we currently retain two part-time employees, who I had to cut down from full-time. Over the years, we have employed assistants, at least a dozen writers, videographer, designers, event coordinators, accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers, handfuls of interns on as-needed basis.
Filing a lawsuit against Google would bankrupt our company. For Google to scrape our content, violate our terms of service despite clear instructions without paying us and essentially forcing us into their will is unethical.
The only thing I've seen is how Google has profited off the back of independent publishers while I watch these same people-and myself-lose their businesses, homes and lives.
This is the real story of how Google has impacted our business.
