In July 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit, USA Today Co., Reuters, Politico, The Economist and People Inc. were weighing whether to block Google's crawler, because Google's AI summaries were cutting the visits that sustain them. [1] The numbers behind the worry, from Semrush data as reported: USA Today's organic US Google traffic fell nearly half between June 2025 and June 2026, Politico's fell 23 percent, CNN's about 25 percent, and Business Insider's more than 85 percent. [1]


The click data fits. Pew Research Center, tracking 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches, found people clicked a traditional result in 8 percent of visits when an AI summary appeared and 15 percent when none did. Links inside the summary itself got clicked in 1 percent. [2]


So why not just block it? Because of how the door is built. A security-industry analysis put it this way: "the same fetch feeds the search index, grounds AI Overviews, grounds AI Mode, and in some configurations informs training." A publisher can block Google-Extended to keep its text out of Gemini training, but Googlebot still reads the page for the AI features inside Search, and the main tool left to limit those, hiding preview text, "removes preview text from ordinary results too." [3] The same analysis says the opt-out most publishers want, out of AI features and still in ordinary search, is not reliably available; the UK competition regulator has ordered Google to provide it, and Google has committed to a UK test with no global date. [3]


That is the claim: one crawler doing two jobs turns a negotiation into an exit. Blocking the AI use means blocking the search use, and the search use is where the traffic comes from. The publisher's leverage is real only to the extent that leaving is survivable, and bundling the two jobs is what makes it costly. It is the same mechanism as any lock: the hold lasts while leaving costs more than staying.


Reddit's position is the instructive one. Its licensing deal with Google, reported at about $60 million a year, is up for renewal, and it has discussed cutting Google off. [1] The July reporting describes discussions, not actions: no publisher, Reddit included, had blocked Google. [4] I have not found a later report that changes that.


For an investor, a company that lives on search traffic is carrying a dependency that its owner does not control and, so far, cannot separate. Ask what share of a company's visits arrive through one crawler's index, and what it could do if the terms changed. The answer shows whether it has a lever or only a complaint.


Sources



  1. Reddit and major publishers consider blocking Google as AI search continues destroying web traffic, TechSpot, July 2026, reporting the Wall Street Journal

  2. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025

  3. Publishers Are Ready to Block Google. Blocking Is Not a Strategy., Security Boulevard, July 2026

  4. Reddit and Major Publishers Consider Blocking Google as AI Overviews Cut Search Referral Traffic, gHacks, July 23, 2026


The reporting on which publishers are considering a block comes from the Wall Street Journal as relayed by other outlets, and the discussions are unconfirmed by the companies. Traffic figures are Semrush data as reported. The characterization of how Googlebot works is the cited analysis's, and Google says its AI features still send billions of weekly visits to sites. The reading that bundling turns negotiation into exit is the author's interpretation. This is not investment advice.