Reading again about referral traffic from Google trending towards zero, this time at Reddit. The problem as I understand it is that Google scrapes the content and serves it in their AI answer. You can stop them from crawling entirely (losing all referral traffic), but can't opt out of having them give away your content for you.

What if you served them an AI summary that describes the content without giving it away? For example "problem X with symptoms Y is presented and several solutions are proposed". An open weight flash model could do that for less than a penny a post. Now they know what you have but can't give it away.

Reddit has enough of the content they want that it could be a leader there. It would only work for smaller operators if "everyone" was doing it.