Reddit and major publishers consider blocking Google as AI search continues destroying web traffic

[midian182]

Ripple effect: Google's push to turn Search into an AI answer engine isn't pleasing a lot of people, not least the publishers it relies on for answers. Some could even decide that they'd rather disappear from Google entirely than continue handing over their data and losing traffic.

Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist, and People Inc. are among the companies reconsidering how much access they should give Google as referral traffic continues to collapse, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Reddit has discussed blocking Google from using its enormous collection of user posts for AI purposes. The two companies are currently negotiating a possible renewal of the licensing agreement they signed in 2024, which reportedly pays Reddit around $60 million per year.

Reddit's deal saw Google receive a constantly updated source of human conversations to train its models, while Reddit gained tens of millions of dollars ahead of its IPO. But things look less appealing when Google's AI products use the scooped-up data to answer questions without sending users back to Reddit.

Investors don't appear thrilled by the prospect of the relationship breaking down. Reddit shares fell as much as 5.8% in premarket trading following the WSJ report.

This isn't just a Reddit problem, either. USA Today Co. is considering blocking Google's crawler if search referrals continue to decline. Semrush data shows that organic US Google traffic to the national USA Today website fell by almost half between June 2025 and June 2026. Politico declined 23%, CNN lost around 25%, and Business Insider's traffic plunged more than 85%.

"It's time to take a stand and say enough is enough," said USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed.

Google does have controls that allow publishers to limit how their content is crawled and used, but using them comes with a big caveat. Publishers can block content from being used to train Gemini through Google-Extended, but preventing it from appearing in AI Overviews brings the risk of losing visibility in conventional search as well.

More extreme measures such as noindex would remove pages from Google entirely, while nosnippet can also hurt their presence in results.

That problem is being addressed in the UK. Last month, the country's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to let publishers opt out of AI search features without sacrificing their place in traditional results.

Google says it will test the controls in Britain before introducing them globally, though it has not provided a timeline.

A Pew Research Center study last year found that users clicked traditional links in 15% of searches without an AI Overview, falling to just 8% when one appeared. Links inside Google's summaries received clicks in only 1% of searches.

Google insists that its AI features still send billions of visits to websites every week and help publishers grow their audiences. The company has also started paying more than 200 publishers for AI access and allows users to select preferred news sources. But publishers are obviously questioning the logic of an arrangement in which their work trains the systems replacing their traffic.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has repeatedly warned that AI summaries are destroying the business model that supported the web, and bots now account for around 56% of internet traffic. Blocking Google entirely is about as extreme as things can get, but for some publishers, it's better than the alternative.

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Reddit and major publishers consider blocking Google as AI search continues destroying web traffic

 

[PXAbstraction]

Reddit, who sold their user's posts and comments in bulk to OpenAI for training in order to juice their IPO with no compensation to said users, is now upset that AI is lowering their traffic. You can't make this up.

 

[toooooot]

Reddit, who sold their user's posts and comments in bulk to OpenAI for training in order to juice their IPO, is now upset that AI is lowering their traffic. You can't make this up.

Well, that is the point of this article. They all want to make money off their sites. If Google does not pay them, it is just "borrows" their content to make money.

I think a lot about this quote I read somewhere "AI is the biggest theft in history."
At least, Reddit can defend itself. Millions of much smaller businesses can only watch as AI owners become billionaires while they slowly lose the ability to earn money through their websites.

 

[yRaz]

Well, that is the point of this article. They all want to make money off their sites. If Google does not pay them, it is just "borrows" their content to make money.

I think a lot about this quote I read somewhere "AI is the biggest theft in history."
At least, Reddit can defend itself. Millions of much smaller businesses can only watch as AI owners become billionaires while they slowly lose the ability to earn money through their websites.

Sounds like that's the small businesses' fault for not being a billionaire tech bro. How dare they not launch trillion dollar IPOs. Like, how foolish could they be?

 

[pnntmp]

The traditional web search and the model based on it are dead. Attempt to resuscitate it are futile.

I'll definitely not go to Reddit or any of the other sites and search it separately if a LLM does not give me a satisfactory answer (I almost always include in my prompt "ignore information from Reddit", but that's another story).
The choice these sites have is get little search traffic from links in LLM responses, or block Google/LLMs and get zero search traffic.

 

[PXAbstraction]

Well, that is the point of this article. They all want to make money off their sites. If Google does not pay them, it is just "borrows" their content to make money.

I think a lot about this quote I read somewhere "AI is the biggest theft in history."
At least, Reddit can defend itself. Millions of much smaller businesses can only watch as AI owners become billionaires while they slowly lose the ability to earn money through their websites.

Oh I agree, AI models are trained on unfathomable amounts of stolen content. I just find it ironic that Reddit in particular, who gave them this data willingly, is now upset that AI is lowering their traffic. I'm sure many told them this before they made the deal but Steve Huffman wanted his big pay day and probably decided the consequences were "for later". I feel for the sites who are getting screwed by AI, not so much for Reddit.

 

[Burty117]

Hold on comment section, we haven’t had our resident multi-trillionaire defence force tell us it’s not theft.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Hold on comment section, we haven’t had our resident multi-trillionaire defence force tell us it’s not theft.

And how much have you paid these sites to read their contents?

 

[Burty117]

And how much have you paid these sites to read their contents?

I wasn’t talking about the web sites, besides, I’m sure they’ve had plenty of Ad revenue from me.

I was talking about the AI companies and a particular member of this site that sorta just stands up for all multi-trillion businesses regardless of anything, surprised he’s not already here in all honesty.

 

[LordVile95]

The traditional web search and the model based on it are dead. Attempt to resuscitate it are futile.

I'll definitely not go to Reddit or any of the other sites and search it separately if a LLM does not give me a satisfactory answer (I almost always include in my prompt "ignore information from Reddit", but that's another story).
The choice these sites have is get little search traffic from links in LLM responses, or block Google/LLMs and get zero search traffic.

And what happens when all of those sources go bust and the LLM now doesn’t have any data to scrape for a result? Even now it just resorts to Reddit which is wrong most of the time

 

[Endymio]

Millions of much smaller businesses can only watch as AI owners become billionaires while they slowly lose the ability to earn money through their websites.

You mean like they lose the ability to earn money when you download and install ad-blocker software?

...we haven’t had our resident multi-trillionaire defence force tell us it’s not theft.

You realize this very article you're posting to was the result of a human doing exactly what Google's "AI summary" does -- located and read an article somehow, then paraphrased and summarized it. When you can delineate how one is theft and the other is not, let us know.

Or you could wise up and use words appropriately. Sites easily have the ability to bar Google from crawling their pages: as long as they freely allow it, it isn't theft. It may be (and probably is) an unsustainable business model .... but it Is. Not. Theft.

 

[scoffer]

SO -stop merely talking about what you would like to do /what you think you should do - and actually DO IT....Jeez.................
"Investors don't appear thrilled.............." So? And? How does it go? 'The value of your investment may go up or down in value...blah blah blah.' Tough ****!

 

[brucek]

Google skipping most large subreddits for "knowledge" training is probably an improvement for all concerned.

(I still use Reddit for some niche, small-membership subreddits and find them useful -- because there's not enough eyeballs for astroturfers and trolls and marketers to care to exploit them -- but I am not impressed by the junk in the large communities it keeps trying to push to me.)

 

[toooooot]

You mean like they lose the ability to earn money when you download and install ad-blocker software?

The scale, the scale... there was never such a possibility to steal the entire internet and still not be sued for this. You cannot compare this to something like a multimillion dollar studio (Bungie) stealing unique art from a small artist's page. This gives the strongest the ability to steal everything, especially from small people who cannot fight this machine. It is about the scale.

 

[Vanderlinde]

Both can burn really.

Even if you surf on Reddit on Mobile your pushed with a half screen covering banner to install the app. Yep and start having advertisements. And that's exactly why I run a adblocker to begin with.

 

[pnntmp]

And what happens when all of those sources go bust and the LLM now doesn’t have any data to scrape for a result? Even now it just resorts to Reddit which is wrong most of the time

Worrying about that is similar to "who will buy stuff when robots take all jobs and everyone's unemployed". It's a ridiculous hyperbole, not something that may actually happen.

LLMs already scraped what can be scraped .. and believe it or not, new knowledge actually does not emerge from the internet. Most websites are automatically generated spam or propaganda BS, and if their number all of a sudden drops 10x, nobody will notice.

 

[LordVile95]

Worrying about that is similar to "who will buy stuff when robots take all jobs and everyone's unemployed". It's a ridiculous hyperbole, not something that may actually happen.

LLMs already scraped what can be scraped .. and believe it or not, new knowledge actually does not emerge from the internet. Most websites are automatically generated spam or propaganda BS, and if their number all of a sudden drops 10x, nobody will notice.

You are aware that a lot of new knowledge is available on the internet right? News is all published online, reviews like from this site are published online, scientific papers and journals are available online.

 

[Endymio]

The scale, the scale... there was never such a possibility to steal the entire internet

Stop the drama-queen histrionics. Anthropic downloaded approximately 0.01PB worth of copyrighted works. There is at least 150,000,000 PB of data on Internet servers.

This gives the strongest the ability to steal everything, especially from small people who cannot fight this machine.

More banal tropes? Any "small people" wronged by a major corporation will find hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of tort attorneys, greedily clamoring to take the case on a contingency basis.

 

[PXAbstraction]

Worrying about that is similar to "who will buy stuff when robots take all jobs and everyone's unemployed". It's a ridiculous hyperbole, not something that may actually happen.

So you don't think that if mass unemployment happens due to automation and AI (which for the record, is not going to actually happen) and there's no jobs left and no UBI, that people will still be able to spend as they do at levels of high employment? If you have no income, where does your spending power come from?

 

[pnntmp]

So you don't think that mass unemployment happens due to automation and AI (which for the record, is not going to actually happen) and there's no jobs left and no UBI, that people will still be able to spend as they do at levels of high unemployment? If you have no income, where does your spending power come from?

Of course I don't think that, I'm not crazy.
"Mass unemployment" does not happen at all. The unemployment rate is essentially flat for the last 3-4 years, and pretty close to the historical minimum. The occupations claimed to be most at risk of AI replacement by "experts", like software engineers, radiologists etc. have a very notable uptick in job openings in the last year.
What are you talking about ???

 

[Endymio]

So you don't think that mass unemployment happens due to automation

No. Why not learn history? We've been increasingly automating society for over 200 years now, and still jobs remain. During Britain's so-called "textile revolution", the introduction of automated looms -- which detractors such as the infamous Luddites claimed would eliminate textile jobs entirely -- actually vastly increased the number of Britons employed in the industry, and made Britain the textile capitol of the world.

 

[LimyG]

Reddit...mmm......if Google AI means I never visit a reddit site again, then thanks Google.

Boohoo Reddit, ha ha.