> The Google Index put a lot of existing content creators out of business, like local newspapers. They certainly did not see this great benefit of a Google index.

I dunno why you ignored the entire part of my comment wherein I describe the gradual fallout with Google, but frankly it's difficult to even begin with how infuriatingly wrong this line of thinking is.

So basically, you're saying that local newspapers, for example, did not see some great benefit from the Google search index. In fact, they're being killed by it! Shivers.

But wait a minute. How? How is Google killing the websites that its indexing? Is it because they're causing their hosting bills to skyrocket through negligent web crawling? Doesn't seem to be. Is it because they're charging websites through the nose to be listed? No, being listed in Google is free... Yeah, the reason why Google is "killing" local newspapers is simply local newspapers don't make as much money from Google traffic as they used to.

Forget about how Google is benefiting from local newspapers without giving back to them as much. That is happening, but there is a crucial and specific detail in your argument that needs to be scrutinized. If websites simply saw no benefit from being indexed by search engines, uhm, They Simply would choose to not be indexed in search engines. You can choose to do that. But they won't, because the problem isn't actually that Google is killing them. That's just the soppy rhetoric used to sell asinine ideas like the Link Tax wherein you will be billed for providing a hyperlink to a website.

The point I was going on about in my original comment was in fact that search indices like Google were in fact, always a give-and-take operation. Google benefits from having content in the index, websites benefit from the traffic they get from Google. The difference today is that Google does work harder to keep you off of the actual target website by adding features like info boxes containing snippets and again, AMP caches. However, note that these features don't really increase the "take": Google is taking exactly the same thing it always did, it's indexing your web sites and presenting its information in a transformed format on theirs. What it's giving, however, in terms of traffic to websites, has decreased over time.

Meanwhile, generative AI is a take operation. Certainly both search engines and generative AI models provide utility to the users of their respective services, but in case of generative AI models, it's only in service of the owners of the model, who give essentially nothing back, not credit, not a link, and certainly not revenue sharing of any kind.

This isn't in defense of Google's practices by any means: Like I said, they upset the balance that was in place from unspoken agreements. However, it definitely is in defense of the truth, and the truth is a phrase like "Google kills local newspapers" is bullshit, and if it wasn't, they'd all be running away from the Google index as fast as possible. Instead, many of them closely follow the latest SEO tricks, still.

And I hate this narrative anyways, because if organic Google traffic and Google Adsense was the only thing funding local newspapers, they were never sustainable by any measure in the first place.