As the Google search engine accelerates its transformation into an artificial intelligence question and answer engine, a large number of publishers are facing a cliff-like decline in recommendation traffic, which has triggered strong dissatisfaction in the publishing industry. Some media outlets have even begun to consider completely severing ties with Google, preferring to "disappear" completely from Google searches rather than continue to hand over their data and watch the loss of traffic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a number of well-known companies, including Reddit, Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist, and PQ, are currently re-evaluating how much access they open to Google.
Among them, Reddit is considering preventing Google from using its huge user post content for artificial intelligence training. The two parties are currently negotiating the renewal of a license agreement worth approximately US$600,000 (Note: the original text is approximately US$60 million) signed in 2024. Previously, the cooperation gave Google access to a steady stream of human conversation data to train its AI models, while Reddit received tens of millions of dollars in funding on the eve of its initial public offering (IPO). However, the deal became less attractive when Google's AI products used the collected data to directly answer user questions but no longer directed users back to Reddit. Affected by this news, investor concerns were quickly reflected in the stock price, with Reddit falling as much as 5.8% in pre-market trading.
This dilemma is not unique to Reddit. Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett Company, the publisher of the U.S. Today newspaper, said bluntly: "It's time to take a stand and say, 'Enough is enough, really enough.'" If search traffic continues to decline, the company is considering blocking Google's web crawler. Data from the data analysis agency Semrush shows that between June 2025 and June 2026, the natural search traffic from Google to the national website of "Today" in the United States dropped by nearly half; during the same period, "Politician" magazine dropped by 23%, CNN lost about 25%, and "Business Insider" traffic plummeted by more than 85%.
In the face of resistance from publishers, Google has provided some control options that allow it to restrict how content is crawled and used, but this comes with a considerable cost. While publishers can prevent content from being used to train the Gemini model through a "Google extension," they also run the huge risk of losing exposure in traditional searches by blocking it from appearing in AI overviews. Taking more extreme measures such as disabling indexing will completely remove the page from Google.
This contradiction has already prompted regulatory intervention in the UK. Last month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to allow publishers to opt out of AI search features without sacrificing their traditional search rankings. Google said it would test the controls in the UK and then roll them out globally, but it has not yet given a specific timetable.
A study last year by the Pew Research Center found that users clicked on traditional links 15% of the time in searches without an AI overview, but this rate plummeted to 8% once the AI overview appeared; meanwhile, the click-through rate for links within Google snippets was just 1%.
Although Google insists that its AI capabilities still bring billions of visits to major websites every week and help publishers expand their audiences, and the company has begun paying more than 200 publishers for AI access, publishers are obviously deeply questioning the logic of "using their own efforts to feed a system that ultimately steals their own traffic."
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has repeatedly warned that AI summary is completely destroying the business model that supports the entire Internet. Currently, various types of network robots account for about 56% of Internet traffic. Completely blocking Google may be the most extreme response at present, but for some desperate publishers, this seems to have become the only option to get better than the current situation.