Is Google Finally in the "Finding Out" Phase of FAFO?

A new lawsuit by a wronged publisher has a lot of merit, apparently...

Author

Sean Markey
February 27, 2025

February 27th, 2025

Hello! Welcome to my old/new SEO newsletter.

A quick note about how you ended up on this list, before you yell at me:

I’m finally ready to admit it: I have a newsletter problem. I have started and semi-abandoned too many newsletters. You are receiving this because a newsletter you were on (and legitimately signed up for, I might add) has been liquified like a caterpillar in a cocoon and emerged as the beautiful green and black butterfly of an SEO newsletter.

To refresh your memory, you might have been on one of these lists:

  • The Weekly SEO, which I acquired in 2023

  • The Domain Discoveries newsletter, about SEO and Domains

  • The SEM newsletter I first started on Substack

I’ve been wanting to launch a short, daily SEO newsletter for a while—mostly as a product of how much I constantly want to write about SEO and how little I actually do it.

So hello! Welcome to my overcorrection.

From this newsletter you can expect a daily-ish short email of some noteworthy thing involving SEO, and my take on it, a breakdown of it, why it’s important, or why it’s stupid and not important.

PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD.

If you’ve changed your mind about being subscribed to a newsletter by me, it’s easy to unsubscribe (at the bottom of this email) and you’ll never hear from me again…

But I hope you’ll stay, because I’ve got a lot to say, and because I think I’ve got a lot of value (and memes) to bring to your inbox.

That’s it. Most of these intros won’t be so long, but I figured I should do a bit of an intro this first time.

If you’re sticking around, thanks! You won’t regret it probably…

SECTION

Chegg Sues Google For Being A Traffic-Stealing Bitch

The Quick Summary:

Chegg is suing Google with a savage antitrust lawsuit (not copyright, twist!!) claiming Google's AI Overviews are basically digital publisher extortion. They brought in Susman Godfrey—the legal equivalent of hiring a freshly grief-stricken John Wick.

It took me several, several searches to find the text of the actual lawsuit (and not just news articles about it). Here that is.

I first heard about this on Twitter from Nate Hake, a travel blogger that got F’ed in the A by the HCU update, who ALSO happens to have experience as a commercial litigator, and wrote a very spicy post about how bad this lawsuit could possible be for Google.

The Deep Dive:

So Chegg is some kind of homework helper or study guide breakdown service. It’s for students.

And, according to Similar Web, it gets some ginormous traffic (~20M per month), 80% of which is organic.

I looked at their traffic in Similar Web and it looked REAL weird:

However, when you stack their competitors’s traffic graph atop their own, it becomes obvious this is just Winter break lol:

So.

How bad is Chegg’s organic traffic (at least according to Ahrefs)?

Down in December, but WAY less F-ed than Nate’s Travel Lemming travel site:

Yikes.

The stock chart paints a slightly worse picture, and might be a clue as to why they’re mad? IDK:

Chegg says “Google is co-opting publishers' content to keep users on its own site, erasing financial incentives to publish,” as summarized by Reuters.

Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg—it's about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries

Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz

The main Antitrustal argument seems to be this:

You can tell ChatGPT’s crawler and whatever other AI-company’s crawler to fuck off via robots.txt with little consequences, but if you say that to Google’s crawler very suddenly your site disappears from the SERPs.

So they’re saying you HAVE to give big G’s monopolistic ass permission to crawl your site to get that sweet organic traffic (while it lasts, lol), but you cannot ALSO stop them from crawling stealing crawling the rest of your site and training their LLM with it, to repackage all your great content as a future AI answer that would have probably led to your site getting traffic.

What will become of this?

I dunno, but it’s a lawsuit I’ll be watching with wide eyes, and definitely reporting back to you about.

And seriously go read that Twitter post, it’s got some really great observations, like:

Paragraph 13 is chef's kiss 🫰... "Google’s conduct is already eroding incentives for Chegg and other publishers to produce such valuable and useful content. If not abated, this trajectory threatens to leave the public with an increasingly unrecognizable Internet experience, in which users never leave Google’s walled garden and receive only synthetic, error-ridden answers in response to their queries—a once robust but now hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust."

Nate Hake

  1. Search engines are supposed to be intermediaries between users and web publishers. The complaint quotes old-school Google saying "We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible."

Would you tell Google’s AI crawler to fuck off if it meant Googlebot would still crawl/index your site?