by Nate Hake at Travel Lemming
Google is Using AI to Censor Thousands of Independent Websites Like Mine (And to Control the Flow of Information Online)
[Note: What follows is a blog-post formatted version of the 34 page letter I submitted to the FTC on May 21, 2025 in response to the agency’s RFI entitled: “Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship.” I have also added a section at the end on what you can do to save the open web from Google’s AI takeover.]
Introduction:
I am an American citizen and founder of the Florida company Travel Lemming LLC. Travel Lemming runs a website, TravelLemming.com, that provides online travel advice.
In this letter I will explain how Google censored my travel website – and thousands of small and independent web publishers like me – all so that it can use AI to control the flow of information online.
In late 2023 and early 2024, Google released an unprecedented series of algorithm updates that utterly decimated thousands of independent websites.
Travel Lemming lost more than 95% of our Google organic search referral traffic in these updates.
The shadowban algorithm that hit us was supposedly based on the content on our websites. But we later realized the shadowban really was about the type of website we are (i.e., small and independent).
While Google gives large publishers an appeal and recovery process, small and independent publishers have no path to appeal our shadowbans.
This is true even though Google admitted our shadowbans are its fault and not ours.
In fact,…
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