Reddit, USA Today, Politico, Reuters and the Economist are all considering blocking Google from now crawling their contect!
Reddit, USA Today, Politico, Reuters, and The Economist are all reportedly weighing whether to block Google from crawling their content.
The reason is straightforward. Google’s AI Overviews now answer the question directly on the search results page, using publisher content to do it, without sending the reader to the source. Traffic that used to convert into a visit now just doesn’t happen.
USA Today’s CEO put it bluntly: “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough.”
Here’s what makes this a genuinely hard decision and not an easy one: there’s no way to opt out of just the AI summaries.
Blocking Google’s crawler to stop showing up in AI Overviews also means disappearing from regular search results entirely.
The tools publishers have (noindex, nosnippet) don’t let you pick one and keep the other. So the choice isn’t “stop Google from using our content for free,” it’s “risk our entire search visibility to make a point.”
The honest question underneath this isn’t really about Google. It’s about what happens to any business that built itself entirely on top of someone else’s platform and never had a real backup channel to its audience.
Nearly all of us have built our websites to optimize and drive Google traffic for two decades. Now the rules changed unilaterally, overnight, from the other side, and there’s no clean way out.
Reddit, USA Today, Politico, Reuters, and The Economist are all reportedly weighing whether to block Google from crawling their content.
The reason is straightforward. Google’s AI Overviews now answer the question directly on the search results page, using publisher content to do it, without sending the reader to the source. Traffic that used to convert into a visit now just doesn’t happen.
USA Today’s CEO put it bluntly: “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough.”
Here’s what makes this a genuinely hard decision and not an easy one: there’s no way to opt out of just the AI summaries.
Blocking Google’s crawler to stop showing up in AI Overviews also means disappearing from regular search results entirely.
The tools publishers have (noindex, nosnippet) don’t let you pick one and keep the other. So the choice isn’t “stop Google from using our content for free,” it’s “risk our entire search visibility to make a point.”
The honest question underneath this isn’t really about Google. It’s about what happens to any business that built itself entirely on top of someone else’s platform and never had a real backup channel to its audience.
Nearly all of us have built our websites to optimize and drive Google traffic for two decades. Now the rules changed unilaterally, overnight, from the other side, and there’s no clean way out.
What do we do now?!
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