Media Briefing: Threatening to quit Google’s crawlers is just publishers’ new hope

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why publishers are flirting with the idea of breaking up with Google — and what’s stopping many from finally walking away.

• Why most publishers won’t break up with Google
Bloomberg explores going public, People Inc. looking to sell Daily Beast, and more.

Why most publishers won’t break up with Google

At a lunch meeting in midtown last week, a media exec told me if it was up to them, of course they would break up with Google tomorrow and shut off its access to the content Google now uses to answer questions itself, rather than sending readers to find the answer on the publisher’s site. It would be, as they put it, a way to protect their content and stick it to the big guy — one that would fill them and others in their position with a sense of power in an ecosystem in which many feel powerless. 

But they run a large, portfolio publishing company. The risks, they said, just aren’t worth it. 

The exchange was a reality check at a time when publishers are starting to think big. Their threats to break up with Google are kicking up again. Many are considering blocking Google’s crawlers. None have pulled the trigger, and chances are they won’t.

We’ve been here before, after all. In 2014, Axel Springer restricted Google’s access, betting it could get paid licensing fees for its content. Instead, referral traffic crashed and within two weeks the German publisher backed down. That same year, publishers in Spain tried to get Google to pay to link to their content, only to have Google close down Google News in the country, cutting off publishers from the platform’s referral traffic.

Those episodes proved something publishers still haven’t shaken: the web runs on a dependence on Google that’s hard to untangle, even now. Every time Google tightens its grip on publishers’ future (remember header bidding?) they talk a big game about cutting ties. And each time it’s the hope that gets them. 

Now, maybe more than most. 

Some publishers believe the value exchange — Google gets content for its search results, publishers get traffic they can monetize — has become, well, less valuable to them. It’s already eroded, they argue, because AI features are now keeping users on Google’s platform. Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 2026 year over year, according to Ozone data. That’s fewer pageviews to sell ads against.

Little wonder then that publishers have begun modeling what their businesses would look like without Google referral traffic. Some executives came to the conclusion that if Google’s value as a traffic source diminishes enough, giving Google unrestricted access to their content may no longer be worth the tradeoff, they told Digiday. That’s a big if, though. 

“To some extent, it’s quite a liberating idea. No longer being beholden to the vagaries of a seemingly arbitrary algorithm that works in your favor one day then leaves you stranded the next,” said a head of SEO at a news publisher.

As another publishing exec put it, the calculation of whether to cut ties with Google all comes down to how reliant a publisher is on Google search traffic for revenue. Publishers with large, healthy subscription businesses are more willing to even think about blocking Google. Those that have diversified their traffic sources can also weigh the risks and rewards. 

Reuters is one of the companies making that calculation now – though, to be fair, the company is “continuously evaluating this trade-off,” according to Phil Andraos, gm of digital.

“As with any bot or crawler, whether to block search bots is a question of economic trade off. Publishers have to weigh the benefits of allowing a bot to scrape and use their content against what they may be giving up. Publishers that rely heavily on search traffic for their business models are more likely to see greater value in allowing access, while others may reach a different conclusion,” Andraos said.

But these are gilded positions to be in. 

How many publishers can boast a healthy, durable subscription business? When was the last time you heard publishers wax lyrical about how robust their traffic is beyond Google? Remember all those publishers who swore they’d shaken their dependence on ad revenue? Exactly. Yes, it’s important to run the math whenever the talk turns to walking away from Google, but like all dysfunctional relationships, the math was never really the point.

“We are a single title media company,” said one publishing exec, on the condition of anonymity. “We are big in brand stature, but we’re kind of medium in scale. And for us, we still do get a good amount of traffic from Google… We don’t feel like we’re in a position to cut them off.”

That’s not naivety so much as pragmatism. Their business focus is to continue to diversify traffic sources and revenue lines not dependent on Google traffic, while also figuring out how to monetize the growing source of traffic from AI bots.

“We still do get the benefits of search traffic, and we are seeing more opportunity with these AI crawls and what that represents,” the exec said. “We aren’t dependent on that traffic. We don’t build our growth strategy around Google traffic… But having them come and crawl our site is still, we think, valuable.”

There are, in other words, unintended consequences to blocking Google. 

“It’s tempting to think, ‘Google is stealing my content, it’s not paying for it and it’s not even driving traffic any more so what’s the harm in turning it off’, [but] this is not a trivial decision,” said the head of SEO at a publisher, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity. “A lot of readers use Google to navigate to us directly. They type our brand name into the search bar. What happens when we’re no longer there? More and more people are starting their online journeys either via LLMs or Google features like [AI Overviews] and AI Mode — including our loyal subscribers — why would we make our content less visible to them?”

And for those first-movers that choose to take the plunge, what if their traffic craters? It could give competitors the opportunity to gain relative share of whatever Google traffic remains.

Zack Zerndt, director of search product at USA Today Co., told Digiday earlier this summer that his team was figuring out how to move into the white space left open by publishers leaning away from the search results page.

“Other publishers are pulling out in certain areas. What we’re doing is [looking at] where are opportunities in the SERPs to come in and take some more authority in some of these spaces,” Zerndt said at the time.

None of this is to say publishers should not do anything. A wave of large publishers limiting access to their content could be the push for Google to fix the system it built and broke. Google has already agreed to comply with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority ruling to give publishers the ability to opt-out from AI features while keeping their place in search results. It has until next year to do so. 

And if that option expands globally, it could remove the need for the binary choice publishers are ruminating over now. For any industrywide change, litigation seems to be the answer, not de-indexing from Google search.

Or maybe that’s more wishful thinking. As we’ve previously reported, the opt-out is seen by many as a poisoned chalice. Publishing execs told Digiday it was still impossible to judge the consequences of opting out versus staying in, due to a lack of data on how this would impact their referral traffic and competitive pressure. 

So, which brave publisher wants to be the case study here? Especially if it ends up being the example that proves de-indexing was a mistake? Or, is it the opportunity to be the first to make a victorious stand against Google?

“While the priority must be reestablishing a proper value exchange — if not in the form of clicks, then payment for content — shutting off what is still, for most people, the front door of the internet and remains a primary driver of reaching new users and potential subscribers still feels like an absolute last resort,” the head of SEO said.

What we’ve heard

“I don’t think the answer should be a simple block-or-don’t-block decision. Publishers need separate controls for traditional Search, AI-generated answers, training and other uses, along with clearer reporting, attribution and a fairer value exchange. Until those controls exist, I would recommend that publishers first measure the relationship between crawling, referrals, AI citations, conversions and direct audience growth, then consider selective restrictions or controlled experiments rather than an immediate sitewide block.”

– John Shehata, CEO and founder of SEO analytics firm NewzDash

Numbers to know

180: The number of BuzzFeed staffers being let go in the first restructuring move under Byron Allen’s ownership, representing a 35% reduction.

15.5%: The percentage of Google news searches in the U.S. where the Top Stories carousel appeared inside the AI Overview, according to NewzDash analysis.

13.6%: The percentage of publisher sites that would be covered by Cloudflare’s Sept. 15 deadline for when the default proxy settling will allow search crawlers but block training and agent use for pages with ads, according to HasData.

What we’ve covered

Google is morphing from media to tech, adland braces for impact 

• Google is increasingly becoming a cloud and AI infrastructure company, with Google Cloud growing much faster than its ad business.
• Google’s future competitive edge may come less from traditional ad tech and more from its AI and cloud platforms, potentially changing where the company invests and how marketers engage with it.

Read more here.

Kai Cenat’s Streamer U was a ‘masterclass’ for brands looking to tap content creators

• Streamer Kai Cenat’s five-day creator bootcamp was an example of how brands can integrate into creator content successfully, with at least 16 partners embedding themselves into livestreams that reached 1.2 million concurrent Twitch viewers and generated massive social sharing. 
• Marketers said the event proved that giving creators creative control can deliver stronger results, from clipped content and social engagement long after the livestreams ended. 

Read more here.

How AI costs are quietly reshaping principal media deals

• Agencies are increasingly using principal media deals to absorb the rising cost of AI tools, bundling AI costs into media buys instead of charging clients directly.
• The practice is reshaping principal media as a way to finance AI investments, even as agencies acknowledge they’ll eventually need more transparent pricing models as AI costs continue to climb.

Read more here.

In Graphic Detail: The real impact of creators at the World Cup

• Some called this year’s tournament the Creator World Cup. Creator-led content outperformed celebrity endorsements, with successful activations from Kalshi, Polymarket, and Airbnb.
• YouTube and TikTok’s unique partnerships with FIFA proved successful, and mega creators brought their young fans to watch the storied tournament in droves with alternative broadcasts and coverage across social media.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

Bloomberg explores going public

Bloomberg execs are having “preliminary talks” with investment bankers about a potential IPO or other transaction, Semafor reported, though the company denied founder Michael Bloomberg has plans to sell the company.

People Inc. may try to sell The Daily Beast again

People Inc is exploring a possible sale of The Daily Beast now that the site is profitable, Axios reported.

News subscribers starting to see renewal price disclosures

As Digiday previously reported, recent legislation is pushing publishers to disclose when they use personal data to inform subscription renewal prices. Subscribers have begun seeing these all-caps disclosure in renewal offers from outlets like Wired and The Wall Street Journal, Nieman Lab reported.

Forbes CCO is out

Forces chief content officer Randall Lane has unexpectedly stepped down after nearly nine years in the role, TheWrap reported. Kerry Lauerman, executive editor at Forbes, will oversee editorial operations in the interim.

Some nonprofit news sites see search traffic bump

Nonprofit news outlets like The 51st, CalMatters and The Colorado Sun experienced bumps in search traffic from coverage of local elections, Nieman Lab reported.