Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 14 January. Here’s our daily round-up of media news.

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🤖 A Google exec told MPs yesterday that she believes the tech giant has the right to scrape the entire open internet to train its AI models.

That means everything you’ve ever published is seen as fair game unless it is behind a paywall.

Public affairs chief Roxanne Carter told MPs yesterday Google was creating “new content” and is not replicating publishers’ work. But while it may change the order of words around a bit, it is stealing the facts and other information that journalists have sweated hard to create.

A reminder: Google’s ad revenue is at least £20bn a year, ten times more than every professional publisher combined.

Like Meta, Google also makes a fortune out of illegal and fraudulent content because it has legal opt-outs which make tech platforms largely immune from prosecution. At Christmas I came within seconds of giving my credit card details to a dropshipping site selling a suspiciously cheap table tennis table. It was the top Google shopping result, Google’s own site checker said the page was legit - it was only after quite a lot of further digging that I realised I was about to be scammed by a site pretending to be Costco.

While the UK government is talking tough on regulating X, it treats Meta and Google with kid gloves because of their huge lobbying power and because they are protected by the ever-present threat of punitive trade sanctions against governments that undermine the free flow of cash back to Silicon Valley. X sacked most of its UK staff and is a much smaller business than the Facebook and Google owners.

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📉 Our latest top-50 ranking of the biggest English-language news websites in the world provides more evidence of the corrosive effect Google’s move into the AI-answer business is having on news publishers around the world.

Only eight sites out of 50 posted year-on-year growth. Traffic to most sites fell by more than 10% year on year in November.

Google’s AI Overviews are stealing content and clicks and so undermining the journalism which feeds them.

READ THE FULL STORY

📝 In the face of all this AI disruption, we have a timely piece from former head of SEO at Global, Steven Wilson-Beales.

Publishers need to adopt a far more sophisticated approach to stand out in the new era of search, he argues. And he’s written a handy primer on the new metrics that news organisations need to pay attention to if they want to stand out in both search and with AI answer engines.

READ THE FULL STORY

🤏News In Brief

Award-winning Times head of investigations Paul Morgan-Bentley is leaving the role after eight years to join Channel 4 News as head of forensic journalism. (Press Gazette)

Goalhanger has signalled expansion of its written content after recruiting former Sunday Times journalist Emily Kent Smith to the new role of editorial director. (Press Gazette)

The Hollywood Reporter publisher Penske Media has sued Google, accusing the tech giant of illegally monopolising the digital advertising market and depriving publishers of revenue. It seeks monetary damages and cou