As the US government weighs its options following a landmark “monopolist” ruling against Google last week, online publications increasingly face a bleak future. (And this time, it’s not just because of severely diminished ad revenue.) Bloomberg reports that their choice now boils down to allowing Google to use their published content to produce inline AI-generated search “answers” or losing visibility in the company’s search engine. The crux of the problem lies in the Googlebot, the crawler that scours and indexes the live web to produce the results you see when you enter search terms. If publishers block Google from using...