Google has made the decision to terminate its enterprise-level subscription to the *Financial Times*, an action that, according to individuals familiar with the matter, does not stand in isolation. Several other corporate media subscriptions are reportedly under review and potentially headed for elimination as well. Although the direct financial savings from such cancellations may only amount to relatively modest sums, the choice serves as a highly visible signal of the company’s ongoing campaign to trim expenditures. This initiative forms part of Google’s broader strategy of operational cost reductions, even though the corporation continues to deliver robust quarterly performance and revenue growth.
Throughout the year 2025, Google has applied increasingly stringent measures to control spending across numerous departments. These measures include not only scaling back managerial roles—resulting in the reduction of approximately thirty-five percent of managers responsible for overseeing particularly small teams of three or fewer employees—but also offering voluntary separation packages across multiple business segments as early as January. The financial chief, Anat Ashkenazi, articulated late in the prior year that the organization would likely extend its emphasis on tightening operational efficiency beyond initial cuts. That forecast has borne out: despite Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announcing its formidable second-quarter results in 2025—with revenues climbing to an impressive $96.4 billion—the austerity mindset has clearly persisted and shows no signs of reversal.
While these subscription cancellations and managerial reorganizations may, in terms of strict financial magnitude, save Google only thousands of dollars when compared with the scale of its immense revenues, their symbolic weight is much greater. They coincide with increasingly delicate and often tense dynamics between Google and the publishing industry, which has grown frustrated over what it perceives as the company’s encroachment on its ability to retain traffic and audiences. Industry data from August, compiled by Digital Content Next, underscores this shift: publishers reported a median 10% reduction in referral traffic arriving from Google Search in the brief period between May and June of this year. Non-news-focused websites fared even worse, recording drops of about 14%.
The impact has been especially conspicuous for some of the best-known journalistic outlets. Analytics from SimilarWeb indicate that platforms such as CNN, Business Insider, and HuffPost have endured traffic reductions far more severe than the overall median—falling by approximately 30%, 40%, and 40%, respectively. Publishers and analysts attribute these steep declines primarily to the prominence of Google’s recently introduced “AI Overviews” feature. This system, intended to synthesize and display comprehensive answers to user queries directly within the search results page, effectively diminishes the likelihood that users will proceed to external publisher websites. According to research by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of searches resulting in a direct click-through to news outlets has declined dramatically—from 56% before AI Overviews to as high as 69% bypassing external links following its implementation. Pew’s study in the spring of 2025, based on the digital habits of 900 adults in the United States, revealed that six out of every ten participants encountered at least one Google search in March that generated an AI-driven answer embedded in the results.
For many in the industry, this dynamic evokes a provocative analogy: Google discontinuing prominent news subscriptions such as the *Financial Times* is interpreted as reminiscent of a student discarding a textbook they continue to copy from. The symbolism suggests that the company benefits from the information and labor of professional content creators while simultaneously reducing its own financial contributions to them. This sentiment of discontent has been publicly voiced by leading figures in media. At a high-profile Fortune conference earlier this month, Neil Vogel, the CEO of People Inc.—the largest magazine and digital publisher in the United States—openly criticized Google with strikingly blunt language. He described the technology giant as a “bad actor,” accusing the company of exploiting the very same automated web-crawling infrastructure both for its search indexing and as the foundation of its machine-generated summaries.
Reinforcing these criticisms, Jason Kint, the Chief Executive Officer of Digital Content Next, expressed severe concerns during the summer in a sharply worded opinion piece. Kint alleged that Google’s reliance on AI summaries is cultivating an online environment increasingly characterized by “zero-click” outcomes—search results where the user’s information needs are satisfied directly on Google’s platform, without any incentive to proceed to the originating publishers. In his view, this trend effectively halts audience flow at the gateway of Google, leaving traffic to traditional media outlets stranded or stifled at what he described as “dead ends.”
Despite the rising chorus of criticism, Google has not issued any official statement in response to these reports, nor has it directly addressed the mounting grievances raised by publishers concerning diminishing referral traffic or the symbolism behind its cancellation of enterprise news subscriptions.
Sourse: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/19/google-isnt-kidding-around-about-cost-cutting-even-slashing-its-ft-subscription/
