Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Financial Times, and sources indicate it is not the only enterprise media subscription on the chopping block. These cuts are part of broader cost-reduction efforts at the search giant, even as the company continues to report strong financial performance.
Google has been implementing cost reductions throughout 2025. This has included 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.” This mandate appears unchanged despite Alphabet reporting strong second-quarter 2025 results with $96.4 billion in revenue.
While canceling subscriptions may save Google mere thousands of dollars, the move comes as the company 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. According to Pew Research, the feature has reduced click-throughs to external websites from 56% to 69% since its launch. This spring, Pew analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults and found that six in ten had conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary. 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, Neil Vogel, the CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S., People Inc., did not hold back. He called Google a “bad actor” and accused it of using the same bot to crawl websites for its search engine as it does to support its AI features.
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. Google did not respond to a request for comment.