Reddit is weighing whether to keep letting Google use its posts for AI, with the two sides negotiating a renewal of the $60M-a-year licensing deal signed in 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal. Executives are questioning what the company gains by feeding Google material when AI-generated answers cut clicks back to the site. USA Today, Politico, Reuters, the Economist, and People Inc. are considering similar moves, though blocking Google's crawler is close to all-or-nothing since it typically pulls a publisher out of both AI summaries and blue-link results. Organic search referrals from U.S. Google users dropped close to 50% at USA Today's flagship paper over the year through June 2026, 23% at Politico, and more than 85% at Business Insider, per Semrush. Google says its AI features “send billions of clicks to the web every week.”
