“We provide web publishers with clear, granular controls to manage their content, including Google-Extended for AI training and a new Search Console control we are testing for generative AI Search features, neither of which impact traditional Search visibility,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. “We are committed to designing AI experiences that highlight the web, drive valuable traffic to publishers, and provide the insights they need to succeed.”
Historically, abandoning Google Search would have been commercial suicide, according to SEO consultant Lily Ray. It is simply too valuable of a source of audience discovery and traffic.
“It’s a really hard tradeoff. Some publishers have already blocked OpenAI until it strikes partnerships, but with Google it’s hard,” Ray said. “Google is a different conversation because it has so many more users than other AI firms.”
But the gradual erosion of search traffic in recent years has, paradoxically, given publishers more agency to consider walking away from the platform.
USA Today Inc., which encompasses not just USA Today but a nationwide network of news sites, is weighing its options on the matter, according to CEO Mike Reed.
The company, like many others, has responded to declines in search traffic by bolstering audience from other sources, like newsletters, social media, and events. Its traffic has remained relatively stable in recent years, hitting its goal of 1 billion pageviews every month for the last three years, according to Reed.
Still, its monetization strategy going forward as it relates to AI will come from licensing agreements, which the company has struck with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, among others. Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers.
As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to Reed. Likewise, the creator network Beehiiv announced in a recent partnership with Cloudflare that its network of creators now has the ability to block the Google crawler.
“I wouldn’t call it a big decision because we’re blocking other crawlers,” Reed said. “For those with licensing agreements, they get our content. For those without, we block them.”
While USA Today Inc., Beehiiv, and Cloudflare are the first major players to take this step, executives at every major media company have a model for what it would look like if they blocked the Google Bot, according to one executive who wished to remain anonymous because of business engagements with Google.
The decision of when to make that decision is mostly a matter of math: Once search traffic drops below a certain threshold, the value of appearing there becomes less than the value of withholding that content as a bargaining tactic. And to be clear, every publisher would prefer Google to come to the negotiating table.
