Media giants are considering blocking Google

Google’s rapid transformation into an AI-powered answer engine is sparking a wave of outrage, particularly among media publishers, whose content the tech giant is using to build its own solutions. Some of them are prepared to take drastic measures – even going so far as to completely remove their content from the search engine – to stop the free transfer of data amid declining traffic.

According to The Wall Street Journal, well-known companies such as Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist, and People Inc. are reviewing the terms under which the search bot accesses their pages due to a drastic reduction in search-driven traffic.

Reddit is currently negotiating the renewal of its licensing agreement starting in 2024, with an estimated value of approximately $60 million per year, and is considering blocking the use of its users’ posts for AI models. The original agreement guaranteed Google a steady stream of real-time human interaction to train its algorithms, while Reddit received a substantial financial injection ahead of its IPO. However, the arrangement is losing its appeal as Google’s smart features provide ready-made explanations based on collected data, thereby depriving the site of its audience.

Concerns about a potential breakdown in the relationship have affected financial performance: following the WSJ report, Reddit’s stock fell nearly 5.8% in pre-market trading.

The crisis isn’t limited to social media platforms. USA Today Co. is considering banning Google’s web crawler from indexing its site if the decline in referral traffic doesn’t stop. Analytics from Semrush show that from June 2025 to June 2026, organic search traffic to the USA Today website in the U.S. nearly halved. Politico lost 23%, CNN recorded a drop of approximately 25%, and Business Insider’s figures plummeted by more than 85%. USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed emphasized the need for decisive action, stressing that it is time to say “enough is enough.”

Although Google provides tools to regulate bot activity, using them carries significant risks. Media outlets can block Gemini’s access to their content using the Google-Extended directive; however, attempting to remove their content from AI Overviews risks losing rankings in regular search results as well. Using the strict “noindex” tag completely hides pages from Google, while the “nosnippet” parameter significantly degrades how websites appear in search results.

In the UK, regulators are already addressing this issue. Last month, the local Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) required Google to allow publishers to exclude their content from expanded algorithmic answers without losing rankings in standard search results. Google agreed to test this mechanism in the UK before a global rollout, but has not yet specified a timeline.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center last year, users clicked on traditional links in 15% of cases when AI Overviews were absent, but when the AI block appeared, that figure dropped to 8%. Meanwhile, links embedded directly within Google’s text summaries received clicks in only 1% of search sessions.

For its part, Google maintains that its AI features continue to drive billions of visits to websites each week and help expand audiences. In addition, the company has already signed payment agreements with more than 200 publishers and implemented the ability to select preferred news sources. Despite this, the media industry questions the logic of a partnership in which its own content serves as the foundation for systems that destroy its traffic.

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince has repeatedly warned that AI-generated responses are destroying the business model of the modern internet, where bots already account for about 56% of all traffic. A complete ban on Google remains a radical step, but for some publishers, such a scenario is preferable to the current state of affairs.

Media giants are ready to block Google over AI services stealing their audience

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