Search traffic has declined so much that some publishers are considering opting out of Google entirely

Back in 2024, Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, coined the term “Google Zero,” which he defined as “that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites.” It increasingly feels as if that moment has arrived, and some publishers appear to be heading toward the decision that the way to deal with it is to cut Google off entirely.

The problem, The Wall Street Journal reports, comes down to Google’s web crawlers, which the company uses to both index websites for search and train its AI models. Publishers can turn off the bots that crawl their sites, but doing so also means their site won’t turn up in traditional search. A few years ago, killing search discoverability to save your traffic would have been unthinkable. But, the Journal shows in a chart worth looking at in that story, traffic declined by more than 40% for some publications between June 2025 and June 2026, according to Semrush data. (The Guardian and the BBC saw gains.)

According to Cloudflare, bots now make up more than half of all web traffic, and beginning on September 15, the tech company will block multi-purpose crawlers — those that scrape for both search indexing and AI training — unless site owners opt out.

The Journal piece is the latest in a host of news stories about publishers threatening to leave Google. “We’ve been clear about what we want,” Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen told Adweek earlier this month. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed told the Journal. The company, which is currently suing Google over an alleged ad-tech monopoly, says it may turn off Google’s access completely if search traffic continues to decline.

“I wouldn’t call it a big decision because we’re blocking other crawlers,” Reed told Adweek. “For those with licensing agreements, they get our content. For those without, we block them.”

USA Today isn’t the only publisher considering blocking Google. According to the Journal, Reddit is reevaluating its $60 million per year deal with Google after seeing traffic declines, and Politico and Reuters are both considering limiting Google bot access and putting up registration walls. Last year, Penske Media sued Google over its AI summaries. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel told the Journal that “Turning [Google] off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table.”

Last month, a British regulatory court ruled that Google must allow publishers to opt out of participating in AI features without affecting traditional search results. Google is testing that ability in the U.K. (and has nine months to make the change) but hasn’t rolled it out globally. The Journal reports that the U.K.-based Economist has been “actively discussing” opting out of AI search, but its VP of generative AI (whom you might imagine has a bit of a stake in the whole AI thing) said that opting out of Google entirely isn’t an option because “traffic can be choppy and declining, but traffic is still traffic.”

Time, meanwhile, is trying to monetize the bots by using what the Journal calls “a sort of Trojan horse approach — creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but that AI crawlers might find.” The idea is that AI chatbots might then reference those ads when responding to user queries without knowing they are ads, like some sort of insidious sponsored content.

The fact that publishers are considering opting out of Google entirely marks a significant turning point. For years, anyone who wanted to be found on the internet had to operate by Google’s rules, making constant SEO tweaks to maximize reach. But Google also needs those companies to play ball; without them, its headline product would be gutted.

“No publisher wants to make do without Google, but many are increasingly prepared to do so,” Mark Stenberg wrote in Adweek. “Google, on the other hand, has no such backup plan.”