Google has ended its enterprise subscription for The Financial Times, and it’s not just the enterprise media subscription for Chopping Block, sources say. The cuts reflect broader cost-cutting efforts at search giants, despite the company reporting strong financial performance.
Google has implemented cost cuts in 2025, eliminating 35% of managers overseeing teams of less than three, and offering voluntary exit programs across multiple departments since January. Financial Director Anat Ashkenazi showed at the end of last year that the company would continue to push for cost cuts “a little more.” This is a mandate that appears to have not changed despite the alphabet reporting strong second-quarter results with revenues of $96.4 billion.
These cuts could save Google just thousands. They also come as Google faces an increasingly tense relationship with news publishers. August data from the Trade Association’s digital content showed that the median referral traffic from Google Search to publishers fell 10% between May and June this year, with non-news brands experiencing a 14% drop.
Major outlets, including CNN, Business Insider and HuffPost, reportedly have reduced sharper traffic (30%, 40% and 40%, respectively), according to Simarweb data.
According to Pew Research, publishers believe that Google’s AI overview features are in a major decline. This spring, Pugh analyzed data from 900 US adults. Six of them conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 to create AI-generated summary.
Unlike rival Openai, which has signed deals with numerous major publishers, including The Financial Times, News Corp and Axel Springer, Google has resisted a lot of licensing its content, resulting in a decline in traffic. So far, at least, Google has found very few transactions with the Associated Press or an annual Reddit deal worth $60 million a year. (A new Bloomberg report shows Reddit is currently considering renegotiating a contract with both Google and Openai. Bloomberg suggests that Reddit considers its prominent role in search results and generation AI training as even more valuable than it originally understood.)
Google reportedly began exploratory consultations with 20 outlets over more content licensing transactions this summer. Still, seeing Google cancel their FT subscriptions may look like someone who refuses to buy textbooks that the plagiarist is copying.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
At the Fortune event earlier this month, Neil Vogel of People Inc., CEO of America’s largest digital and printing publishing company, has not held up a punch, calling Google a “bad actor” and accusing him of crawling websites for search engines in the same way he uses the same bot to support AI features.
Unlike other AI players, Google cannot block AI systems without confiscating search traffic by linking AI training to search for access.
“For a long time,” Vogel said at the event: “The transaction was: “Take content, build a search engine, send traffic back.” That transaction is off. ”
At Skazas Operations this summer, the next CEO of digital content, Jason Kint, wrote that Google’s AI overview is creating a “zero-click” environment where “all traffic ends on Google.”
Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Update: This story has been updated with information about Google’s content licensing transactions.
Source link
