Major publishers are openly discussing something they have never actually done: cutting Google off from their content. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 22 that Reddit has internally discussed shutting off Google's access to its content for AI use, while Politico and The Economist weigh their options.
The sharpest words come from news
Mike Reed, chief executive of USA Today Inc., said "it's time to take a stand and say enough is enough," and is prepared to delist from Google within six to 12 months. Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., was blunter: "Turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table." Reuters' president said the company is "certainly looking at the economic trade-offs between search and AI summaries."
Why it is technically hard
Google uses one crawler for both search indexing and AI. Blocking Google-Extended stops Gemini training but does nothing about AI Overviews; suppressing those requires the nosnippet directive, which guts a site's search visibility. That is the bind publishers describe: the lever that stops the AI also switches off the traffic.
The numbers behind the anger
Organic search traffic to Business Insider fell 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. Pew found click-through rates drop from 15% to 8% when an AI Overview appears. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic and other hyperscalers, Google has struck no licensing deals with publishers. Its response: its AI sends "billions of clicks to the web every week."
Leverage, not just outrage
Reddit's position is more commercial than it looks. Its Google and OpenAI licences — the Google deal reportedly worth $60 million a year since 2024 — are up for renewal, and CEO Steve Huffman has pushed to convert flat fees into usage-based pricing that Wells Fargo has modelled at up to $550 million a year.