Within a week of each other, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Jaana Dogan, a Principal Engineer working on Google’s Gemini API, posted comments about AI criticism that shared a theme. Both redirected attention away from whether AI output is “good” or “bad” and toward how people are reacting to the technology.
Nadella published “Looking Ahead to 2026” on his personal blog, writing that the industry needs to “get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication.”
Days later, Dogan posted on X that “people are only anti new tech when they are burned out from trying new tech.”
The timing coincides with Merriam-Webster naming “slop” its Word of the Year. For publishers, these statements can land less like reassurance and more like a request to stop focusing on quality.
Nadella Urges A Different Framing Than “AI Slop”
Nadella’s post argues that the conversation should move past the “slop” label and focus on how AI fits into human life and work. He characterizes AI as “cognitive amplifier tools” and believes that 2026 is the year in which AI must “prove its value in the real world.”
He writes: “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,” and calls for “a new equilibrium” that accounts for humans having these tools. In the same section, he also calls it “the product design question we need to debate and answer,” which makes the point less about ending debate and more about steering it toward product integration and outcomes.
Dogan’s “Burnout” Framing Came Days After A Claude Code Post
Dogan’s post framed anti-AI sentiment as burnout from trying new technology. The line was blunt: “People are only anti new tech when they are burned out from trying new tech. It’s understandable.”
People are only anti new tech when they are burned out from trying new tech. It’s understandable.
— Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll) January 4, 2026
A few days earlier, Dogan had posted about using Claude Code to build a working prototype from a description of distributed agent orchestrators. She wrote that the tool produced something in about an hour that matched patterns her team had been building for roughly a year, adding: “In 2023, I believed these current capabilities were still five years away.”
I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned… I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.
— Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll) January 2, 2026
Replies to the “burnout” post pushed back on Dogan. Many responses pointed to forced integrations, costs, privacy concerns, and tools that feel less reliable within everyday workflows.
Dogan is a Principal Engineer on Google’s Gemini API and is not speaking as an official representative of Google policy.
The Standards Platforms Enforce On Publishers Still Matter
I’ve written E-E-A-T guides for Search Engine Journal for years. Those pieces reflected Google’s long-running expectation that publishers demonstrate experience, expertise, and trust, especially for “Your Money or Your Life” topics like health, finance, and legal content.
That’s why the current disconnect lands so sharply for publishers. Platforms have quality standards for ranking and visibility, while AI products increasingly present information directly to users with citations that can be difficult to evaluate at a glance.
When Google executives have been asked about declining click-through rates, the public framing has included “quality clicks” rather than addressing the volume loss publishers measure on their side.
What The Traffic Data Shows
Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches. When AI Overviews appeared, only 8% of users clicked any link, compared to 15% when AI summaries did not appear. That works out to a 46.7% drop.
Publishers can be told the remaining clicks are higher intent, but volume still matters. It’s what drives ad impressions, subscriptions, and affiliate revenue.
Separately, Similarweb data indicates that the share of news-related searches that resulted in no click-through to news sites rose from 56% to 69%.
The crawl-to-referral imbalance adds another layer. Cloudflare has estimated Google Search at about a 14:1 crawl-to-referral ratio, compared with far higher ratios for OpenAI (around 1,700:1) and Anthropic (73,000:1).
Publishers have long operated on an implicit trade where they allow crawling in exchange for distribution and traffic. Many now argue that AI features weaken that trade because content can be used to answer questions without the same level of referral back to the open web.
Why This Matters
These posts from Nadella and Dogan help show how the AI quality debate may get handled in 2026.
When people are urged to move past “slop vs sophistication” or describe criticism as burnout, the conversation can drift away from accuracy, reliability, and the economic impact on publishers.
We see clear signs of traffic declines, and the crawling-to-referral ratios are also measurable. The economic impact is real.
Looking Ahead
Keep an eye out for more messaging that frames AI criticism as a user issue rather than a product- and economics-related issue.
I’m eager to see whether these companies make any changes to their product design in response to user feedback.
Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock
