Reddit and Major Publishers Threaten to Cut Off Google Over AI Overviews

A group of the largest American publishers and Reddit are weighing whether to cut Google off from their content. The reason is a sharp drop in search traffic caused by AI Overviews and AI Mode, features that answer users directly on the results page instead of sending them to the source articles.

What the Wall Street Journal revealed

According to the Wall Street Journal, executives at several of the largest American media groups are holding internal discussions about restricting or fully blocking Google's crawlers from their sites. The crawlers in question feed both classic search and generative features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, where Google summarizes an answer to the user's query directly on the results page.

The trouble is that publishers currently have no real way to block only the AI features while keeping their visibility in classic search. Google runs a single, shared indexing mechanism, so cutting off its crawler effectively means disappearing from traditional search results too, which still generate a share of traffic.

The numbers convincing the boardrooms

The scale of the declines is what is genuinely pushing publishers to consider such a drastic step. Organic traffic from Google to USA Today shrank by nearly half over the course of a year. Business Insider saw a drop of more than 85 percent, while CNN and Politico lost roughly a quarter and just under a quarter of their search traffic, respectively.

For media companies whose business model has for decades relied on advertising sold around search traffic, a decline this steep is a direct threat to revenue. AI Overviews answers the user's query right on Google's page, so readers often never click through to the source article, even though that article supplied the content behind the generated answer.

This is the time to take a stand and say enough is enough - Mike Reed, CEO of USA Today Co.

Fully turning it off and blocking them is one hundred percent on the table - Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc.

Reddit and the $60 million deal

A separate thread involves Reddit, which in 2024 signed a licensing deal with Google worth roughly $60 million a year, giving the search engine ongoing access to user posts and discussions as training data for its AI models. Now, as that deal nears renewal, Reddit is considering using the situation as leverage, signaling it is willing to restrict access if Google doesn't offer better terms.

Reuters, according to reporters' sources, is also weighing whether to block Google's crawlers in its consumer products, while Politico, owned by Axel Springer, is looking into registration walls that would make automated content scraping harder. The Economist has been in intensive talks since June about opting out of the search engine's AI features.

Alternative strategies among publishers

Not every publisher is choosing confrontation. Time magazine is testing a different approach, embedding text in its articles that is invisible to readers but aimed at algorithms, intended to influence how the content is quoted or summarized by AI systems. Google itself has so far publicly downplayed the scale of the problem, pointing out that overall traffic generated by its search engine remains high despite the growing popularity of competing tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

What this means for the market

If major publishers actually follow through on a blockade, it could become the first serious test of the power Google has built through its dominant position in search. For the search engine itself, losing access to content from reputable newsrooms would mean poorer, less trustworthy answers generated by AI Overviews, which in turn could accelerate the flow of users toward competing tools.

For Polish publishers and content creators, the situation in the US is a warning sign, since Google is gradually rolling out similar AI Overviews and AI Mode mechanisms in European and Polish markets as well. Newsrooms that built their visibility mainly on search traffic could face the same dilemma in the coming months: defend their traffic at the cost of AI visibility, or accept shrinking ad revenue around their articles. None of the companies mentioned, nor Reddit, has yet made a final decision to cut off Google.