Google Faces Potential Block as Global Media Giants Revolt Over AI Search

Global media giants are reportedly considering blocking Google as the tech company’s shift towards an AI-powered search platform causes internet traffic to collapse. According to the Wall Street Journal, companies with plans to restrict Google’s access include Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist, and People Inc. Some of these media firms are even willing to ‘disappear’ from Google’s search results rather than continue to surrender their data without receiving traffic in return.

Reddit intends to prevent Google from displaying posts from the world’s largest forum site. This development comes as Reddit and Google are negotiating the renewal of a licensing deal worth US$60 million per year, which was signed in 2024. The licence gave Google access to train its AI models on human conversations, but Reddit is now realising that Google’s AI products are using this conversational data without driving users back to the Reddit platform.

USA Today, one of the largest media conglomerates in the United States, is also considering blocking Google if organic traffic continues to plummet. Data from Semrush indicates that organic traffic from Google to the USA Today website has been halved in the past year. Other major outlets have seen sharp declines, with Politico down 23 percent, CNN falling 25 percent, and Business Insider collapsing by 85 percent. ‘It’s time to fight back and say enough is enough,’ said USA Today CEO Mike Reed.

Google does provide publishers with the flexibility to restrict how their content is used and scraped by its search engine. If a publisher blocks their content from being used to train the Gemini chatbot, that content also disappears from AI Overviews in Google Search. As a more extreme measure, publishers can implement a ‘noindex’ tag on their websites, which removes them from Google entirely, making them accessible only via direct web address.

The situation has drawn scrutiny from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which has ordered Google to allow publishers to block their content from AI features without negatively impacting their position in traditional search results. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 15 percent of users click on links in search results when AI Overviews are absent, but that figure drops to 8 percent when AI Overviews appear. Links within Google’s AI summaries are clicked on in only about 1 percent of all searches. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince previously warned that AI summarisation features are destroying the business models that support the internet, noting that 56 percent of internet traffic now comes from bots, not humans.