The internet has always had a peculiar moral code when it comes to labor. Build something for free, and you are celebrated as a visionary. Volunteer your time to improve a shared resource, and you are applauded for your generosity. Test unfinished software, report bugs, and offer feedback without compensation, and you are considered part of an elite inner circle.
But offer that same labor for modest pay, and the narrative changes. Suddenly it is exploitation. Free is noble. Cheap is unethical.
No company has benefited more from this contradiction than Google.
Google’s entire empire is built on value it does not directly pay to create. That is not an accusation. It is simply an observation of how the modern web functions. Google provides extraordinary tools, global infrastructure, and near-instant access to information. In return, the world supplies the raw material that makes those tools indispensable.
Every article published, every product description written, every review posted, every tutorial documented becomes fuel for Google’s systems.
We publish content on the open web. Google crawls it, indexes it, and serves it back to users alongside paid advertisements, often from direct competitors. That content improves search relevance, increases user trust in Google, and raises the value of ad inventory through higher competition. The better our content, the more profitable the search results become.
We link to one another. Those links form the connective tissue of the web and serve as ranking signals that determine visibility, authority, and traffic. By doing so, we continuously refine Google’s understanding of relevance and credibility. The web becomes easier to navigate, and search becomes more accurate.
We structure our content to answer questions clearly. We optimize headings, summaries, and schema to make information easier to extract. Increasingly, those answers appear directly in search results as featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI Overviews. The user gets what they need without clicking. Google keeps the attention. The publisher gets, at best, attribution.
We maintain Google Business Profiles with hours, photos, menus, inventory, services, and updates. This data powers local search and Maps experiences that often resolve intent before a website is ever visited. Businesses comply because visibility depends on it, even when the interaction never reaches their own digital properties.
We upload product data to Google Shopping. Prices, availability, specifications, and images populate comparison grids and carousels. Google monetizes placement, promotes sponsored listings, and compresses competition into a single screen. Sellers compete harder for thinner margins on a shelf they do not control.
We use Chrome, Android, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and countless embedded services across the web. With every interaction, behavioral data is generated. That data improves targeting, attribution, ad performance, and AI training. The products get better. The ads get more valuable. The dependency deepens.
None of this happens by force.
And that is the genius of it.
Google does not demand participation. It designs systems so useful, so efficient, and so ubiquitous that opting out becomes impractical. The labor is voluntary, but the consequences of non-participation are not. Visibility, traffic, discovery, and growth increasingly flow through Google’s infrastructure.
I am not writing this from the outside. I am fully inside the system. I use Google Workspace daily. I write in Chrome. I rely on Search, Maps, and YouTube constantly. I publish content that is discovered primarily through Google. I analyze Google products, recommend them, and help businesses succeed within this ecosystem.
I have criticized Google many times, but I have never seriously considered leaving it. Few people have. Try spending a single day online without Google influencing your experience in some way. Even when you think you are avoiding it, Google is often still there in the background.
The most consequential shift in this relationship is happening now.
With AI Overviews and large-scale answer synthesis, Google is no longer just organizing information. It is consuming it, summarizing it, and presenting it as a complete experience. Zero-click search is no longer a side effect. It is a strategy.
From Google’s perspective, this is progress. Users get faster answers. Sessions stay within Google properties. Ads are served without interruption. Data collection becomes more continuous. The platform becomes more efficient.
From the perspective of the people who create the information, the equation has changed. Visibility no longer guarantees traffic. Being the best answer may simply mean being absorbed into the system. Authority is acknowledged, but ownership of the audience is not.
And yet, we adapt.
We optimize content for AI extraction. We simplify explanations. We structure pages so machines can read them more easily. We chase inclusion in summaries that may never send a visitor. We do this because the alternative is irrelevance.
This is where the relationship becomes unstable.
By continuously reducing the incentive for creators, publishers, and businesses to invest in original, high-quality content, Google is slowly starving the very ecosystem that sustains it. When the reward for expertise is diminished to a citation or a fleeting mention, the economics stop making sense. Fewer resources are devoted to research. Less time is spent on depth. The quality of the inputs declines.
The relationship is upside down. The more value contributors provide, the less they receive in return. The platform grows stronger while the suppliers weaken. That imbalance cannot persist indefinitely.
Search quality depends on a healthy, motivated publishing ecosystem. AI systems depend on fresh, accurate, human-generated insight. A system that consumes its sources without replenishing them eventually degrades its own output. Thin content replaces deep analysis. Repetition replaces originality. Noise replaces signal.
Google may win in the short term by keeping users, attention, and monetization within its walls. But in the long term, an ecosystem that exhausts its contributors collapses inward. Either creators find new models, new audiences, and new forms of ownership, or the web itself becomes shallower, less trustworthy, and less useful.
An ecosystem cannot survive if feeding it slowly destroys the feeder.
You’re welcome, Google.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: The Shrinking Economics of Getting Indexed on Google