Google is destroying independent websites, and one sees no choice but to defend it anyway

To WikiHow, Google is both tormentor and savior. And on Wednesday, as the search giant mounted its defense in the ongoing ad tech remedies trial, the how-to site came to Google’s rescue.

WikiHow CEO Elizabeth Douglas described to a court how websites like hers are the middle of an “AI apocalypse.” WikiHow, a website that gives step-by-step practical advice, is suffering from a new paradigm shift in how people find information online. Thanks to new AI tools including AI chatbots and Google’s own AI Overviews in its search results pages, users across the web are clicking through to websites less and less — and as a result, seeing and clicking on the ads on their sites less, too.

Despite Google’s role in that shift, Douglas sees the ad tech tools she uses from Google as a rock for her business. Amid the chaos of adjusting to the existential threat of generative AI, Douglas testified that WikiHow’s Google-powered ad set up “is the stable part of my business right now,” even if revenue from that business is declining. To supplement the ads business, WikiHow also has a content licensing deal with Google that Douglas said makes up 10 to 15 percent of its revenue — and its terms don’t preclude Google from training its AI Overviews on WikiHow pages. As government regulators seek to break up Google’s ad business, Douglas worries that a forced divestiture of one or both of Google’s publisher ad tools could disrupt the one part of her business that can keep the lights on while she figures out how to adjust to a generational shift.

Judge Leonie Brinkema is tasked with imposing a solution that will restore competition to the two markets for publisher ad tech tools she found Google illegally monopolized. The Justice Department says that must include a forced sale of AdX, Google’s advertising exchange, and possibly also DFP, its ad management tool for publishers. Google has spent most of this week arguing that would introduce new problems, including potential hardship for customers. Douglas’ testimony demonstrated the stakes for smaller publishers — but also the role Google’s other products have played in creating the pressure cooker publishers are dealing with in the first place.

That pressure cooker is the trend toward “Google Zero,” or the point at which Google no longer refers search traffic to third-party sites. Search referral traffic has declined for many publishers as Google has added features like AI Overviews, which can have the effect of keeping users from clicking through to a webpage if they got the information they needed from Google’s results page. That might be fine for a user, but it also means that the websites on which Google’s AI was likely trained no longer have the opportunity to serve those users ads that can monetize their sites. Google has denied that its AI Overviews uniformly keep users from clicking through to actual websites, but it also told the court in a filing that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” (It later corrected the filing to clarify it meant to refer to open web display advertising — the market at issue in the case.)

Douglas might not be a fan of everything Google does, or its illegal monopoly, but she told the court that a disruptive breakup of its ad tools would just add another headache for publishers who already have so much on their plates. She’d rather not have to focus her efforts on setting up a new ad-serving system or troubleshooting new problems instead of addressing the existential threats to her business. She warned that a new buyer may not continue the high level of human support she receives from Google, may get publishers less money, and that some ad tech alternatives are far less reliable than Google. One never paid out the ad revenue WikiHow made through its tools before going out of business, she said.

But as the government began its cross-examination of Douglas, it became clear that she wasn’t familiar with some of the ways the court already found Google had harmed publishers like her. That’s not entirely unexpected — Google’s anticompetitive behavior was buried in complex technical auctions that happen in fractions of a second to serve ads on publisher websites. Douglas wasn’t aware that Google was charging a take rate through AdX that the court found was higher than would exist in a competitive market, since WikiHow only sees the net price at the end of the auction.

And Douglas worried that if AdX was no longer part of Google, it wouldn’t be able to bring her a unique source of advertiser demand, rather than the same overlapping pools of demand other ad exchanges pull from. But she didn’t realize the source of that unique demand — Google’s own ad network — was kept unique and leveraged by Google to form an illegal tie between its publisher products that ultimately harmed publishers.

To WikiHow, Google may be one of the core drivers of its existential business threat. But it’s also the friendly account manager, making sure the tech behind its dwindling source of revenue is working as intended.