According to a Wall Street Journal report cited by TechSpot, Reddit and several major publishers are reevaluating the amount of reach they provide to Google due to a decline in search referral traffic following the rollout of AI Overview.
Companies considering sanctions include Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist and People Inc. The concern is that Google’s AI features are providing answers directly to users without redirecting traffic to the original sources.
Following the report, Reddit shares fell as much as 5.8% in premarket trading.
Reddit is considering stopping Google’s use of AI in its posts
According to the Wall Street Journal, Reddit has discussed the possibility of blocking Google from using its archive of user posts for AI purposes. The two companies are currently negotiating a possible renewal of the licensing agreement signed in 2024, which reportedly pays Reddit around $60 million annually.
Under the existing deal, Google receives a constantly updated source of human conversations for training its AI models, while Reddit received millions of dollars before the IPO.
TechSpot reports that this arrangement now seems less beneficial to Reddit, as Google’s AI products use licensed data to answer questions without sending users back to Reddit.
The decline in traffic is not limited to Reddit. USA TODAY The company is considering blocking Google’s crawler if referral numbers continue to decline. According to SEMrush data cited by TechSpot, organic US Google traffic to the USA TODAY national site fell nearly in half between June 2025 and June 2026. Politico’s traffic declined by 23%, CNN saw a decline of nearly 25%, and Business Insider experienced a decline of more than 85%.
“It’s time to take a stand and say enough,” said USA TODAY Company CEO Mike Reed.
Google’s opt-out controls create a trade-off for publishers
Google offers a variety of controls for publishers to manage how their content is crawled and used, but each option comes with its own trade-offs. Publishers can block content from using Google-extended tokens to train Gemini, but doing so risks losing visibility in traditional search results as well as AI observations.
More restrictive measures, such as noindex directives, remove pages from Google entirely, while nosnippets can limit a page’s appearance in search listings.
This relationship between AI features and standard search rankings presents a significant challenge for publishers who want to opt out of AI observation without abandoning search results entirely.
Regulators in the United Kingdom are addressing the issue. Last month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to allow publishers to opt out of AI search features without risking their position in regular results.
Google has announced plans to test these controls in the UK before making them available globally, but no timeline has been provided.
Click-through data shows impact of AI observations
A Pew Research Center study last year found that users clicked on traditional links in 15 percent of searches that did not include AI observations. When an observation came to light, that number dropped to 8 percent. Links to Google’s AI summaries were clicked on in just 1 percent of searches.
Google reports that its AI features still drive billions of visits to websites every week and help publishers expand their audiences. The company has started paying more than 200 publishers for AI access and allows users to choose their preferred news sources.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has warned that AI summaries could harm the Web’s business model, noting that bots now make up about 56 percent of Internet traffic.
Site operators assessing their own exposure to potential traffic losses from AI observations can take several specific steps based on current controls:
- To identify any decline, as referenced in the SEMrush data, measure the share of organic Google traffic reaching top pages by comparing data from June 2025 to June 2026.
- Check if the Google-extended token is present in robots.txt, which blocks Gemini training content but does not prevent it from appearing in the AI overview.
- Consider the implications of the nosnippet and noindex directives, as both may reduce or eliminate standard search visibility rather than merely impact AI observability.
- UK Competition and Markets Authority monitor the program to allow users to opt out, as Google has said it will test different controls in the UK before any wider rollout.
- Evaluate eligibility for Google’s Publisher Payments program, which currently provides funding for AI access to over 200 publishers.
What’s next for publishers?
Google has not set any timeline for expanding UK opt-out controls to other markets, and it is unclear what the outcome of the Reddit licensing renewal talks will be.
For most publishers, the controls available still present a choice between including their content in AI overview or maintaining standard search visibility. This restriction will continue outside the UK until Google implements its own separate opt-out mechanism.
Thanks for being a Ghax reader. The post Reddit and major publishers consider blocking Google as AI overview cuts search referral traffic appeared first on gHacks.
