AI Overviews could push Reddit to end its $60 million-a-year deal with Google - Neowin
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Reddit is reportedly contemplating whether it should renew its sixty million dollar a year 2024 data licensing deal with the search giant, Google, that allowed it to use Reddit data to train AI models.
The explosion of Google's AI Overviews over the years has led to a sharp drop in web referrals, prompting a massive backlash from publishers who depend on search traffic for revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal, between June 2025 and June 2026, organic Google search traffic from US users fell by nearly half for USA Today, 23% for Politico, 25% for CNN, and over 85% for Business Insider.
Back in March, Chartbeat reported that when an AI summary appears on a query page, click-through rates for original sources plunge by roughly 60% because users find answers directly on Google search results. With all this in mind, it's easy to see why Reddit executives are thinking about not renewing the arrangement as the agreement ends.
Reddit is a huge treasure trove for AI companies because the message board features billions of conversational posts and human opinions organized into thousands of specialized communities. The platform has a roughly $70 million-per-year deal with OpenAI, which it entered back in May 2024 to integrate real-time forum content into ChatGPT while using some OpenAI models to power some of its own native features like Reddit Answers. It has also taken Perplexity to court alleging that the company illegally scraped forum data using third-party vendors like SerpApi and Oxylabs to bypass crawling restrictions.
Like Reddit, other companies like Politico and USA Today are considering restricting data access as Google bots continue to cannibalize referral traffic. At Politico, internal teams discussed revoking Google access to free articles by implementing registration walls. Reuters is also weighing whether to block crawling for its consumer-facing news products as audience numbers dwindle.
Publishers currently have no way to block content usage for generative AI training without blocking the Googlebot entirely, which removes their articles from traditional search results. Early last month, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered the Mountain View tech giant to allow web publishers to opt out of AI summaries without losing positioning in traditional search results. Google received nine months to enforce this ruling.
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