Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Financial Times, and it’s not the only enterprise media subscription on the chopping block, sources say. The cuts reflect broader cost-reduction efforts at the search giant, even as the company reports strong financial performance.
Google has been implementing cost reductions across 2025, including eliminating 35% of managers who oversee teams of three people or fewer, and offering voluntary exit programs across multiple divisions since January. Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi signaled late last year that the company would continue to push cost cuts “a little further,” a mandate that appears unchanged despite Alphabet reporting strong Q2 2025 results with $96.4 billion in revenue.
These cuts may save Google mere thousands; they also come as Google faces increasingly strained relationships with news publishers. August data from the trade association Digital Content Next showed median referral traffic from Google Search to publishers fell 10% between May and June of this year, with non-news brands experiencing 14% drops.
Major outlets, including CNN, Business Insider, and HuffPost have reportedly seen even sharper traffic declines (of 30%, 40%, and 40%, respectively), according to data from SimilarWeb.
Publishers attribute these declines largely to Google’s AI Overviews feature, which has reduced click-throughs to external websites from 56% to 69% since its launch, according to Pew Research. This spring, Pew analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults, six in 10 of whom conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary.
A Google spokesperson responded to this story after publication, stating: “The claim that this is due to a change in our commitment to news partnerships is patently false. Our partnerships regularly evolve, and we have partnerships in place with more than 2800 publications worldwide and we’ve made billions of dollars in payments directly to publishers, platforms and content providers.”
The traffic decline comes as Google has largely resisted content licensing, unlike rival OpenAI, which has signed deals with numerous major publishers, including The Financial Times, News Corp, and Axel Springer. So far at least, Google has struck few deals, including one with the Associated Press and an annual Reddit agreement reportedly worth $60 million per year. (According to a new Bloomberg report, Reddit is now looking to renegotiate its contracts with both Google and OpenAI, with Bloomberg suggesting that Reddit sees its prominent role in search results and generative AI training as even more valuable than it first understood.)
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Google reportedly began exploratory talks with 20 outlets about more content licensing deals this summer. Still, some might see Google canceling its FT subscription as akin to a plagiarist refusing to buy the textbook they’re copying from.
At a Fortune event earlier this month, the CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. — Neil Vogel of People Inc. — didn’t hold his punches, calling Google a “bad actor” and accusing it of using the same bot to crawl websites for its search engine as it does to support its AI features.
While Google’s approach to AI training has differed from other AI players, the company does offer publishers ways to opt out of having their data used without affecting search access.
“For a long time,” Vogel said at the event, “the deal was: ‘Take our content, build your search engine, send us back traffic’. That deal’s off.”
In a separate, scathing op-ed this summer, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint wrote that Google’s AI overviews are creating a “zero-click” environment where “all traffic dead ends at Google.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated post-publication to include a statement from Google and to correct an inaccurate characterization of Google’s AI training policies. The original story incorrectly stated that publishers cannot block Google’s AI systems without also forfeiting search traffic. Google offers an opt-out option that allows publishers to block AI training while maintaining search access.
