Reddit and Publishers Weigh Blocking Google Over AI Traffic Losses

Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist and People Inc. are all weighing whether to restrict Google’s access to their content, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by TechSpot. Reddit’s shares slid as much as 5.8% in premarket trading once the story broke, a decline that deepened toward 9% during the session, according to CNBC-sourced reporting. The trigger is the same everywhere: Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions directly inside search results, and fewer users click through to whoever supplied the answer.

The unpaid volunteer moderators who keep Reddit’s biggest communities running have no seat at that table, and no line in the money now moving between Reddit and Google. They never did.

A $60 Million Deal Nobody Wants to Renew

Reddit and Google signed a content licensing agreement in February 2024, the same week Reddit announced its IPO plans. The deal, worth roughly $60 million a year, gave Google structured access to Reddit’s Data API so it could train AI models on what the company called authentic, human conversations.

Three months later, Reddit struck a similar arrangement with OpenAI, estimated at about $70 million a year. In its IPO prospectus, Reddit disclosed data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203 million, running two to three years, according to TechCrunch reporting cited by Quartz. Wells Fargo analysts have forecast that combined licensing revenue could climb toward $550 million once the Google deal is renegotiated, up from a current run rate near $130 million, though that figure is a projection, not a booked number.

• $60 million a year is what Google has paid Reddit since February 2024 to train AI models on its posts.
• $70 million a year is the estimated value of Reddit’s similar licensing deal with OpenAI, signed three months later.
• $203 million is the aggregate value of all data licensing arrangements Reddit disclosed in its IPO filing.
• $0 is what any individual Reddit poster or moderator has been paid out of those deals.

Now Reddit is reportedly considering not renewing the Google arrangement at all. TechSpot reports the setup looks less advantageous today, since Google’s AI products increasingly answer questions using the licensed data without sending anyone back to Reddit to read the original thread.

Traffic Craters at USA Today, Politico and CNN

The pattern is not limited to Reddit. According to Semrush data cited by TechSpot, organic US Google traffic to USA Today’s national site fell by nearly half between June 2025 and June 2026. Politico’s traffic dropped 23%. CNN saw a decline of around 25%. Business Insider’s fell more than 85%.

USA Today Co. chief executive Mike Reed did not soften the message. It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough, he said, according to the Wall Street Journal reporting cited by TechSpot.

A Pew Research Center study tracking roughly 69,000 Google searches from 900 US adults found users clicked a traditional link in 15% of searches without an AI Overview, versus 8% when one appeared. Clicks on the links Google embeds inside its own AI summaries happened in just 1% of searches.

The Deal Was Built on Free Labor

Eight Thousand Subreddits Went Dark

This is not the first time Reddit’s own community pushed back on exactly this kind of arrangement. In April 2023, Reddit announced it would start charging for API access, a move that would force third-party apps like Apollo to shut down. Apollo’s developer, Christian Selig, said the new pricing would cost him up to $20 million a year.

More than 8,000 subreddits went dark that June, coordinated by tens of thousands of volunteer moderators protesting a change they had no vote on. Reddit’s stated reason, according to the Trust and Safety Foundation, was that it could no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large scale data, a direct reference to the large language models being trained on Reddit posts. The company held the line, and Apollo shut down on schedule.

Landed Gentry, in the CEO’s Own Words

Reddit co-founder and chief executive Steve Huffman, in one interview during that protest, called the moderators leading it landed gentry. Ten months later, Reddit announced the $60 million Google deal alongside its IPO filing.

without compensation from a company worth billions of dollars

That is how Vice described the unpaid moderators who keep Reddit’s largest communities functional, in its coverage of the 2023 blackout. Huffman has also argued publicly that Reddit’s data should not be, in his words, given to some of the largest companies in the world for free, according to Quartz. He never extended that argument to the people who actually wrote the posts.

The Columbia Journalism Review has reported that Reddit’s opening position in the current Google renewal talks would encourage more Google users to contribute to Reddit’s forums, so that traffic itself becomes fresh training material for future deals. Once again, the people generating that content are not in the room where the price gets set.

Why Can’t Publishers Just Opt Out of AI Overviews?

Google gives site owners several levers, and each one carries a cost. Blocking training with the Google-Extended token does nothing to stop a page from appearing inside AI Overviews, and going further with noindex or nosnippet risks a publisher’s entire presence in ordinary search results, not just its AI visibility.

• Google-Extended – a robots.txt token that blocks Gemini model training but still allows the same pages to surface inside AI Overviews.
• noindex – removes a page from Google’s index entirely, eliminating both search visibility and any AI citation.
• nosnippet – keeps a page listed in results but strips the preview text that normally appears beneath the link.
• The UK opt-out toggle – lets publishers block AI Overviews and AI Mode from using their content while keeping normal rankings intact, live only in Britain so far.

That last option is the one publishers actually want, and outside one country, it still does not exist.

Britain Draws a Line Google Has to Follow

On June 3, 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed what it called a world-first conduct requirement on Google, forcing the company to let publishers opt out of AI-powered search features without losing standard rankings. The order followed Google’s designation with strategic market status in general search, and gives the company nine months to comply. Google says it will test the controls in Britain before deciding on any wider rollout, with no timeline given.

The regulator was not finished. Two weeks later, the CMA added conduct requirements covering how Google ranks results and whether users can port their search data to other companies, part of what it describes as an ongoing program of further action to secure a fairer deal for businesses.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has separately warned that AI summaries could be damaging the web’s business model, noting that bots now make up around 56% of internet traffic. Cloudflare made a similar case directly to UK regulators, telling the CMA the new rule stops short of addressing Google’s dual purpose search crawler, since Google still controls how any opt-out actually gets defined and enforced.

The Renewal Deadline Nobody Has Confirmed

Google says its AI features still drive billions of visits to websites every week and has started paying more than 200 publishers for AI access, letting users pick preferred news sources inside its tools. That does not change what happens once a publisher’s traffic has already been cut in half.

Some publishers are betting on a workaround instead of a standoff. A recent six million euro round for Promptwatch’s AI search optimization tools was pitched explicitly as the old SEO boom repeating itself, this time aimed at getting cited inside an AI answer rather than ranked among blue links.

Outside Britain, publishers are still stuck choosing between appearing in Google’s AI Overview and keeping full standard search visibility. Google’s nine month UK compliance window runs into March 2027. Whether Reddit renews its Google licensing deal, and whether the moderators who built the value inside it ever see a cent of it, remains undecided as of publication.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do AI Overviews cut clicks overall?

Beyond the publisher-specific numbers above, a large Ahrefs analysis spanning 590 million searches found AI Overviews reduced clicks by roughly 34.5%. Chartbeat separately reported that click-through rates for original sources plunge by roughly 60% once an AI summary appears on a query page, according to Neowin’s reporting.

Why is Reddit more exposed to AI Overviews than most publishers?

Pew’s analysis of AI Overview citations found Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube were the most commonly linked sources in both AI summaries and traditional search results, according to Marketing Charts. That makes Reddit’s user-generated content unusually central to the answers Google now gives without a click.

What must Google actually change under the UK order?

Under the CMA’s publisher conduct requirement, Google must give publishers clear information on how their content is used in generative AI, provide detailed metrics on user engagement with that content inside AI features, and ensure search content is attributed with a clear way for users to reach the original source.

Are other regulators following the UK’s lead?

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has already flagged potential antitrust concerns around AI search, and the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association has called for its own legal framework governing AI search, according to reporting cited by BigGo Finance. No other market has issued a binding order like the UK’s yet.