For twenty years, the deal between Google and the web was simple. Publishers let Google crawl their pages. Google sent readers back in return. That bargain is breaking. Reddit is the latest, and loudest, sign. Its shares fell about 9% on Wednesday after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company has discussed cutting off Google’s access to its content for AI. The two signed a deal in 2024 that lets Google train its models on Reddit posts, worth a reported $60 million a year.
That deal is now nearing its end, and Reddit is not sure it wants to renew on the old terms.
The reason is traffic. Google’s AI Overviews summarise answers at the top of the results page. Users read the summary and never click. Reddit sells ads against the visitors Google used to send, so fewer clicks means less money. Reddit executives reportedly want the next deal priced by usage, not a flat fee.
A Reddit spokesperson struck a measured note. The company is negotiating “just like any business should, by focusing on doing what’s best for Reddit,” it told CNBC. “A lot has changed since those first deals were signed, but our goals are the same.”
Not just Reddit #
Reddit is not alone, and that is the bigger story. The Journal reported that USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist and People Inc are all weighing how, or whether, to keep working with Google.
The numbers explain the anger. Between June 2025 and June 2026, Google referral traffic fell 23% at Politico and about 25% at CNN. At Business Insider it dropped more than 85%.
Some publishers are done asking politely. “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today’s chief executive Mike Reed told Digiday. Independent research suggests click-through rates fall by a third to a half when an AI Overview appears.
For a business that runs on referral traffic, that is not a rounding error. It is the rent.
Reddit’s awkward position #
Reddit sits in a strange spot. Its data is prized precisely because AI systems lean on it so heavily. Chief financial officer Drew Vollero calls Reddit the “most cited source” for large language models, with more than 25 billion posts. Chief executive Steve Huffman has described the platform’s conversations as “like oil for the modern internet.”
That gives Reddit leverage. It also licenses its data to OpenAI, and its total content deals were worth $203 million at the time of its 2024 float. The business is booming, with first-quarter revenue up 69% year on year, and Reddit reports again on 30 July. But the same AI answers that make its data valuable are draining the traffic its ad business needs. Reddit is both supplier and casualty.
Google’s reply #
Google disputes the gloom. It says it still sends billions of clicks to the web each day, and that AI Overviews spread traffic across a wider range of sites. The blue links are not going away, insists Liz Reid, its head of search.
“Search is not a useful product if the web is not a thriving product,” she told Tech Brew, “and so I think we probably care about that more than any other company in the world.”
Publishers are less convinced. Google offers a tool to block AI training, but using it can also hurt a site’s ranking in ordinary search. Britain’s competition regulator has ordered Google to let publishers opt out without that penalty, a rule Google is testing there first.
The old exchange of links for traffic is fraying. Some publishers are already charging AI crawlers or blocking them, and nobody has agreed what replaces it. Reddit just made that impossible to ignore.
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