Several large publishers are strongly considering blocking Google Search entirely after clicks from Google Search have continued to decline, and the exchange of value in having Google consume its content is no longer translating into enough clicks from Google Search.
The Wall Street Journal's Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off shares how sites like USA Today, Politico, Reuters, Economist, People, and many more, including maybe even Reddit are looking to see what would happen if they would just simply disallow Google from crawling its content.
Here are some quotes from WSJ on this:
- “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” said USA Today Co. Chief Executive Mike Reed.
- Employees at Axel Springer’s Politico have talked about limiting Google’s and other bots’ access to its free articles.
- Reuters, which like Politico derives much of its revenue from business-to-business offerings, said it is also weighing whether to block Google’s bot for its consumer-facing news product as traffic declines. “We are certainly looking at the economic trade-offs between search and AI summaries,” said Reuters President Paul Bascobert.
- “The question was, should we do this, and what are the implications of doing it or not?” said Josh Muncke, vice president of generative AI at the Economist, adding that exiting Google entirely isn’t currently part of that discussion. “Google is a powerful force to be reckoned with,” he said. “Traffic can be choppy and declining, but traffic is still traffic.”
- “Turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table,” said People Inc. Chief Executive Neil Vogel.
- “There are now two audiences,” said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer. “We’re thinking about, How do we superserve the humans when they do come, and how do we think about the bots as a secondary audience?”
- Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.
Here is a chart the WSJ posted of the declines these publishers are seeing from Google Search - the data is from Semrush:
This comes after the NY Times published How Google's A.l. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web, which is why Google executives have been floating the metric of Google sends billions of clicks through AI Search features weekly. Plus, Reddit's content deal with Google is up for renewal...
Trouble in Reddit Land following the May core update and June spam update (which I covered in my blog post). Also, the $60M Google deal is up for renewal soon -> Reddit, Politico, and others mull cutting Google's access to their content for AI as traffic drops; Reddit signed a…
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 22, 2026
We are living in interesting times - and I do wonder if any of these large publishers will take that big step of blocking Google Search.
Forum discussion at X.
