Google’s last major agreement was in 2024 with Reddit to train its AI models and improve its search services, followed by a deal with The Associated Press in 2025 to deliver up-to-date news on its AI chatbot Gemini. It has also more nuanced ongoing licensing plans with publishers.
It’s some improvement over being scraped for nothing. But tech companies are the ones setting the price, and it doesn’t compare to what publishers have lost.
We’ll be waiting to see if other publishers follow Cloudflare’s lead and start blocking crawlers outright, rather than negotiating around the edges. As we have seen in the past, quitting major platforms is often too painful to stomach.
