I'm going to agree.
I launched a website that is niche a few weeks ago, but totally unique. After a couple of weeks search console wakes up to tell me that they have indexed one page in 80. And that the top search term that is finding my site says exactly the name of one of my pages, yet Google is showing my homepage in search!
Way to help your users
Yet you can be absolutely sure that Google is training their AI products on the same pages they do not want to show to their search users.
Have you added a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml, even an RSS file?
While I don't know if this will help with Google, I have my own tiny dumb search indexer, and a sitemap is by far the easiest way for me to index an entire website. I'll discover the sitemap from reading your robots.txt file. RSS helps too, but my indexer uses that mostly to find fresh pages without going through your entire sitemap again. I know Kagi's tiny Teclis indexer also uses RSS files for discovery for their indie web index.
> Way to help your users
Dear Jim,
At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users.
Sincerely,
Alphabet inc.
That's every company
It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists) on the web.
Every company is in it for the profits and benefits of its shareholders. Its idiotic to think that companies have benevolent intent toward their customers. If that wasn't the case they would go out of business.
Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships.
We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.