10
Loading video...
By Hugh Cameron
Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
For decades, Google and online publishers accepted the trade-off—the mutually beneficial arrangement in which one would create content as the other drives traffic toward it.
What was for years the norm, publishers attempted to monetize the audience Google sent their way with advertising and subscriptions. But the rise of artificial intelligence has upset this model, with referral traffic tanking and companies growing frustrated as they continue to grapple with longer-running shifts in consumer behavior that threaten their revenue streams.
As AI Overviews and other generative search features answer users' questions directly on the results pages, some publishers are seeing declining interest in their sites and questioning whether Google still delivers enough traffic to justify allowing their content to power its suite of AI search products. This comes as the company continues to spend increasing sums building out the infrastructure required to power that AI future.
Read More on U.S.
As a result, Google finds itself battling backlash from parts of the ecosystem that helped fuel its rise and a challenge to its long-standing status and role as the internet’s primary gatekeeper.
Why Are Publishers Turning on Google?
“If Google can answer a user’s question within its own walled garden, then a publisher loses not only that click but also the opportunity to turn that into something more substantive and meaningful to them,” Damian Radcliffe, Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon, told Newsweek.
Radcliffe said that the generative summaries now provided by Google break the first link in the consumer “chain,” which allows publishers to develop relations with their customers through registrations, paid subscriptions or other offerings like newsletters and podcasts. Such audience relationships have only become even more critical, as publishers battle declining referral traffic from social platforms.
“Google’s AI-generated summaries, featured snippets, and other search features mean that Google is increasingly the final destination for many users, rather than the start of a journey,” he said, though he noted that many users will click on links to verify AI-generated content or “dig deeper” into a subject.
...
According to Semrush data cited by The Wall Street Journal, traffic fell by over 40 percent for some publications between June 2025 and June 2026, though some, such as The Guardian and the BBC, saw increases. Google, however, maintains that publishers are better off within the existing—albeit changing—ecosystem than they would be outside of it.
“Google's AI Search features send billions of clicks to the web every week, meeting people's evolving preferences for how they want to find information while driving significant traffic to websites,” a spokesperson for the company told Newsweek. “Our AI features highlight links to the web and help creators and publishers grow their audiences, and we offer clear controls for website owners to manage their content.”
The company added that many of the challenges facing publishers today reflect long-running changes in consumer behavior rather than the fault of any search engine, such as continually declining trust and interest in the news media.
Related Story
The Future of Search Engines Looks a Lot Like the Past
A 'Strategic Reassessment': How Companies Are Reacting
Amid these shifts, some publishers are threatening to sever ties with Google.
“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” Mike Reed, the CEO of USA Today, told The Wall Street Journal. USA Today's parent company, Gannett, is suing Google over allegedly monopolizing advertising practices.
“I wouldn’t call it a big decision because we’re blocking other crawlers,” Reed told Adweek. “For those with licensing agreements, they get our content. For those without, we block them.”
Reddit is mulling a similar move, according to the Journal, and potentially pulling out of a $60 million-per-year deal allowing Google to train its AI models using Reddit posts.
“I do think publishers have long seen Google as both friend and foe—good for traffic, disastrous for ad revenue,” Jane Singer, a professor of Journalism Innovation at City St George's, University of London, told Newsweek.
Singer said this has forced many to “reconfigure their revenue model,” as “if Google is no longer even delivering the clicks, then what’s in it for publishers? Even less than before, I’d say.”
This comes after the United Kingdom’s principal competition regulator ruled in June that publishers could choose not to appear in Google’s AI-generated results. Google told Newsweek it is also developing features which will enable websites to opt out of having their content appear in, or help inform, its automated result summaries.
In remarks quoted by the BBC, the Competition and Markets Authority said the shift would "put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google.”
Radcliffe told Newsweek that some were “clearly trying to strengthen their negotiating position” and communicate that “their content has value and shouldn’t simply be treated as free training data.”
However, he said that the threats to part ways with what has been called the gateway to the web are also part of “a broader strategic reassessment”—one that has seen publishers learn the risks associated with “being a slave to the algorithm,” while increasingly prioritizing direct relationships with their audiences with memberships, subscriptions and apps.
“Those strategies were already well underway before generative AI arrived,” he said. “AI has simply reinforced why owning the customer relationship matters and why publishers need to double their efforts in this space.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton and Sam Wilson.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines