Google is reevaluating its relationship with one of the richest sources of information online.
Reddit, the online message board that drives a large portion of Google search results, has discussed shutting down the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.
It’s part of a growing group of online media companies expressing frustration with tech giants as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. He says search engines are no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People Inc. And Reuters are all evaluating how or whether they will continue to work with Google.
Reddit struck a deal worth $60 million a year through 2024, allowing Google to use its content to train AI models. But people familiar with the matter said that with AI-generated answers to questions leading to fewer clicks to external websites, Reddit executives are assessing whether there is any benefit to Google continuing to serve its content. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is set to expire soon.
“It’s existential for certain categories of publishers,” said David Buttle, CEO of media consulting firm DJB Strategies. “They’re considering more radical things.”
According to Cloudflare, bots now make up more than half of all web traffic. Some scrape publishers’ content to train their own AI models, others crawl sites to help quickly answer user questions or sell content to other companies. As technology has become more sophisticated, efforts to block bots have turned into a strange game. Publishers still allow Google’s bots — which feed both its AI tools and its search functions — because for now, they generally can’t turn off one element without canceling the other.
USA TODAY Co., which owns the national publication of the same name and hundreds of local titles, is considering blocking Google’s crawler, meaning its content won’t end up in Google’s AI summaries or in its blue-linked search results. According to search measurement firm SEMrush, for national paper USA Today, organic Google search traffic from US users is set to nearly halve between June 2025 and June 2026. “It’s time to take a stand and say enough,” Mike Reed, chief executive of the company, told USA TODAY.
He said the company is prepared to cut off Google’s access if the downward trend in search activity continues. It is already preparing for a future without revenue from Google traffic.
USA TODAY has a lawsuit pending against Google, alleging it holds a monopoly in ad technology that hurts the publisher’s advertising revenue.
Google search traffic from US users declined 23% between June 2025 and June 2026 for Politico’s website, nearly 25% for CNN and more than 85% for Business Insider.
Google says its AI search features “drive billions of clicks across the web every week” and are meeting users’ growing needs. A spokesperson said, “Our AI features highlight links across the web and help creators and publishers grow their audiences, and we provide website owners with clear controls to manage their content.”
Variety and Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sued Google in September on antitrust grounds, alleging that its AI summaries illegally use the publisher’s reporting and reduce online traffic.
Axel Springer’s Politico staffer has spoken out about Google and other bots limiting access to its free articles. According to people familiar with the matter, they have added a registration wall that requires humans to log in to view content.
Reuters, which like Politico gets most of its revenue from business-to-business offerings, said it was also considering whether to block Google’s bot for its consumer-facing news product because of the decline in traffic.
“We’re certainly looking at the economic trade-off between search and AI summarization,” said Paul Bascobert, president of Reuters.
Google said in June that it would comply with a UK regulatory authority’s decision that allows publishers to determine whether to participate in AI features without sacrificing their presence in traditional search results. Google said it would test these features in the UK before making them available to website owners globally, but did not give a specific timeline.
The Economist has been actively discussing the possibility of opting out of AI search features since the UK decision.
“The question was should we do it and what are the implications of doing it or not doing it?” Josh Munke, vice president of generative AI at the Economist, said exiting Google entirely is not part of that discussion right now. “Google is a powerful force,” he said. “Traffic may fluctuate and fluctuate, but traffic is still traffic.”
Google has made some overtures to news outlets, including launching a program that will pay more than 200 publishers for access to their content for AI use. And it now allows users to select preferred news sources to personalize the top stories that appear in search results, potentially driving more traffic to those sites.
People Inc., formerly known as IAC, has managed to boost revenue through events, social-media referrals and expanded apps — even though Google contributed only 25% of its traffic in the first quarter of this year, compared with more than half two years ago. The company, whose portfolio includes People, Better Homes & Gardens and Travel + Leisure, is exploring ways to make its content more digestible for allowed bots and continuing to allow Google to scrape its content while assessing the future of that relationship.
“Shutting them down and blocking them completely is 100% under consideration,” said Neil Vogel, chief executive of People Inc.
Meanwhile, Time is helping advertisers get in front of their message bots by using a kind of Trojan horse approach — creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but AI crawlers can find. The hope is that Google’s AI Overview and other chatbots that collect editorial content can reference information from that content when answering user questions. In turn, this can help brands reach potential customers.
“Now there are two audiences,” said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer. “We’re thinking about how do we oversee humans when they come in, and how do we think about bots as a secondary audience?”
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com
