Google has decided to discontinue its corporate subscription to the Financial Times, and insiders report that other enterprise media subscriptions may also be cut. These reductions are part of wider efforts by the tech giant to control spending, despite the company’s continued strong earnings.
Throughout 2025, Google has enacted a range of cost-saving measures, such as removing 35% of managers overseeing teams with three or fewer members, and launching voluntary separation programs across several departments starting in January. Last year, Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi indicated that further budget cuts were coming, and this approach has remained unchanged even after Alphabet posted robust second quarter results for 2025, with revenue reaching $96.4 billion.
While these subscription cuts might only save Google a relatively small amount, the company is also dealing with growing tensions with news organizations. According to the trade group Digital Content Next, data from August shows that the median referral traffic from Google Search to publishers dropped by 10% between May and June this year, with non-news sites seeing declines as high as 14%.
Reports indicate that large platforms like CNN, Business Insider, and HuffPost have experienced even steeper decreases in traffic—30%, 40%, and 40% respectively—based on figures from SimilarWeb.
Publishers mainly blame these losses on Google’s AI Overviews, which Pew Research says have led to a 56% to 69% fall in click-through rates to outside sites since the feature rolled out. Earlier this year, Pew found that from a survey of 900 American adults, 60% had performed at least one Google search in March 2025 that resulted in an AI summary.
Some critics liken Google’s move to end its Financial Times subscription to someone copying from a book they refuse to purchase.
At a recent Fortune conference, Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., the largest publisher of digital and print content in the U.S., openly criticized Google, labeling the company a “bad actor” and claiming it uses the same bot for crawling sites for its search engine as it does for its AI tools.
In a sharply critical opinion piece this summer, Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, argued that Google’s AI overviews foster a “zero-click” environment where “all traffic stops at Google.”
Google declined to provide a comment.
