The case for and against publishers blocking Google

**Kamika McCoy** (0:10)
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone wondering if publishers will actually cut off Google this time. I'm Kamika McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday.

**Tim Peterson** (0:22)
And I'm Tim Peterson, Executive Editor, Video and Audio at Digiday Media. Kamika, what do you think? Should Digiday cut off Google Search?

**Kamika McCoy** (0:29)
Absolutely not, but I also think this is where I break it.

**Tim Peterson** (0:34)
Quick with the answer on that one.

**Kamika McCoy** (0:36)
Listen, that good, good SEO juice, you know what I mean? But what's your take? Do you think publishers will do it?
Should they?

**Tim Peterson** (0:45)
Do I think publishers will do it? No, I don't think publishers will do it. Should they?
Probably not. I don't think they have enough. Well, let's say this. I don't think most publishers should do it. I think those publishers that should do it will may cut off Google's search as an organic crawler, but will probably need to be running ads on Google to make up for it, which is part of a bigger thing I've been thinking for.
So we had the Digiday Publishing Summit in Europe last October, November, and I remember talking in the room with publishers about referral traffic declines and kind of the AI of it all.
And one thing some of the publishers were talking about is how they need to be acting more like marketers and doing more paid media, which sure, but also that seems really smart to me. Like, what's the most leverage anyone in business has? Money. And how do you get other entities to be cooperative with you? You align financial incentives. So that's a whole other conversation, which actually we probably should have on the show at some point sooner than later. But to our question, the conversation we had in this week's episode was we had on Sara Guaglione, who's our senior media reporter, and Seb Joseph, our executive editor of News, to finally talk about this question that's really bubbled up and seems to be hitting something of a tipping point or reaching it of, are publishers going to cut off Google search?

**Kamika McCoy** (2:45)
Absolutely. Do they play nice with the tech overlords? Again, this is where I break out into cabaret maybe this time.
But nonetheless, very good conversation with Sara and Seb, excited people to listen.

**Tim Peterson** (3:04)
Sara, it's up. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining me and Kamiko. Good to be here.

**Sara Guaglione** (3:08)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

**Tim Peterson** (3:10)
I feel like this is an overdue conversation, Kamiko, as much as we've been talking about publishers and platforms and AI for a couple of years now, I feel like we haven't had the episode tackling the issue head on in terms of, search traffic is now going down. We've had, last decade, it was social traffic was going down in 2018 January of 2018 was when Facebook made the big algorithm change that cut a lot of social traffic for publishers. At that time, publishers were like, okay, this sucks, but thank God we have search. And now it seems like, well, maybe you don't have search anymore. Sara, so at the Digiday Publishing Summit, which we host two times a year, search, referral, traffic to clients have been a topic of conversation for like at least a few years now.
But it feels like this year, the tenor of the conversation has changed, where there are publishers now publicly talking about cutting off Google altogether. What's changed?

**Sara Guaglione** (4:18)
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's less of like a sudden breaking point. And I think more of like, we sort of reached this tipping point now where publishers have seen the writing on the wall, I think for a while, given the conversations we've had at DPS and all the reporting we've been doing on the decline in search referral traffic over the past few years and how, you know, I think publishers at first were trying to do a lot of different things to see if they could bring that back, to see if it was a short-term thing, to see if things would change. And that doesn't seem to be the case. If anything, it seems AI search is only growing, and, you know, it's not going anywhere. And so that search referral traffic is not coming back.
And I think at this point, publishers have done a lot to try to figure out if they can kind of wean themselves off of Google search referral traffic, diversifying their businesses, diversifying, you know, their sort of content discovery and audience acquisition tactics. And now we're at this place where I think publishers are feeling more confident, I would say, in threatening to block Google's crawlers because they're not seeing that value exchange, right? Before it was always like, we let Google crawl our content, we get indexed in search, and that brings people to our website. So we're fine with that. That's how, you know, that's a big part of our business. And now that that is eroding, I think publishers are thinking, wait, why are we doing this? If we're able to diversify successfully, what's the value exchange now because it's really broken down?