Publishers have watched in horror as Google continues to double down on AI features that discourage users from actually clicking on links — a once-steady source of readership that’s causing a crisis in the media now that the search engine is cutting it off.
The situation has become so dire that some publications are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating.
According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, and Reuters are all reexamining their relationship with Google. Some are debating whether to continue to work with the tech giant at all.
“This is existential for some categories of publishers,” media consulting firm media consulting firm DJB Strategies CEO David Buttle told the WSJ. “They are looking at more radical things.”
Even Reddit executives are reevaluating the company’s $60 million-a-year contract that allows Google to train its AI models on user-submitted content on the platform. They’ve similarly watched as Google’s AI features discourage users from navigating to Reddit.
Last month, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noticed that automated bot traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in the internet’s history, a sobering turning point and concerning inflection point for anyone in the attention economy.
USA Today has seen its traffic from US users drop by almost half over the last year, leading executives to ponder whether to cut off Google’s access entirely.
“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today CEO Mike Reed told the WSJ.
Naturally, Google doesn’t see itself as the one to blame, arguing that it’s still sending “billions of clicks to the web every week” and helping “creators and publishers grow their audiences” with the help of AI, as a spokesperson told the newspaper.
Those reassurances, however, are seemingly falling on deaf ears. Beyond pondering whether to cut Google off, other publishers have resorted to suing the company, accusing it of illegally rehashing their intellectual property via AI summaries.
It’s an extremely undesirable position for publishers. By severing ties with the search giant, they could face even steeper declines in traffic. At the same time, there’s seemingly little to gain from having Google’s AIs crawl their content — and in the long term, it could guarantee their destruction.
In some ways, Google is biting the hand that feeds it. AI companies are desperately trying to find new training data that doesn’t include AI-generated slop. By actively discouraging users from visiting websites that source new information, the company is cutting off a fresh supply of the data it so desperately needs.
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