Reddit Weighs Cutting Off Google’s AI Access as $60M Licensing Deal Nears Expiration

This is not Reddit's first show of force. In mid-2024, Reddit updated its robots.txt file to block most search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo) from indexing recent posts and comments, while carving out an exception for Google—which had already paid for a license . The current negotiations could extend that wall even to Google.

Stock market punishment

Investors reacted swiftly. Reddit shares slid 9% on July 22, 2026, the day the WSJ report broke, with premarket drops of 5.8% to 6% reported earlier . The $60 million in annual licensing revenue is a significant line item, and some analysts had factored far larger figures into their forecasts—Wells Fargo floated a potential aggregate contract value of $550 million across Reddit's licensing deals .

The company is due to report Q2 2026 earnings on July 30, putting additional pressure on management to clarify the deal's status .

A publisher-wide revolt

Reddit is not acting in isolation. The same WSJ report identified a growing number of major outlets weighing whether to restrict Google's access :

• USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, and People Inc. are among the names considering blocking or restricting Google's crawler as AI-generated search summaries drive down referral traffic .
• USA Today's organic Google traffic has fallen sharply; a Wall Street Engine analysis reported the flagship paper's Google traffic dropped nearly 50% over the past year, while Politico's declined 23% .
• In April 2026, a group of 20 publishers including CNN, NBC, and USA Today opted out of having their content stored in the Common Crawl web archive used for AI training .

The core complaint is consistent: Google's AI Overviews answer user queries directly in the search results page, drastically reducing the incentive to click through to the original publisher, while Google continues to use the same publisher content to train those AI models . Google maintains that its AI features send "billions of clicks to the web every week" .

The publisher's dilemma

Blocking Google comes with a painful trade-off. The same technical tag that prevents Google from using a publisher's content for AI summaries (a "nosnippet" meta tag) also prevents the site from appearing in traditional blue-link search results . A publisher that opts out of AI search effectively disappears from Google entirely. For outlets that depend on search for a large share of their traffic, that choice is existential.

Despite the risk, the calculus is shifting. "We are certainly looking at all of our options," a Reuters executive told the Journal . Some publishers believe the revenue lost from AI-drained traffic now exceeds the value of whatever traffic Google still sends.

UK regulation shifts the terrain

A major regulatory development may tip the balance. On June 3, 2026, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced new competition requirements for Google's search services under the digital markets framework. The rules compel Google to permit UK publishers to opt out of having their content used in the company's AI functionalities .

Publishers can now use a new toggle in Google's Search Console to exclude their sites from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI summaries in Discover . The CMA described the requirement as giving publishers "enhanced control and more robust negotiating power regarding their content" .

This creates a legally enforceable mechanism for publishers that previously had little choice but to accept Google's terms or risk losing all search visibility . Although the rule currently applies only to the UK, it sets a precedent that other jurisdictions—particularly the European Union under the Digital Markets Act—could follow.

What happens next

As of July 22, 2026, no publisher has yet announced a full block of Google's crawler. The negotiations are ongoing, and both sides have strong incentives to reach a deal . Reddit, with a P/E ratio of 46.36 compared to an industry average of 15.65, carries a valuation that depends heavily on investor confidence in its data-licensing future .

The upcoming Q2 2026 earnings call on July 30 will be closely watched for any signals about the Google deal's trajectory. Meanwhile, the CMA's opt-out mechanism is rolling out, and more publishers could begin using it, testing Google's commitment to keeping AI search as the default.

The standoff is, in many ways, a stress test for the entire content economy: if the largest platforms and publishers cannot find terms that sustain both traffic and AI training, the open web itself may need to be rebuilt on a different foundation.