Google isn’t kidding around about cost cutting, even slashing its FT subscription

Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Monetary Occasions, and it’s not the one enterprise media subscription on the chopping block, sources say. The cuts replicate broader cost-reduction efforts on the search large, at the same time as the corporate stories sturdy monetary efficiency.

Google has been implementing price reductions throughout 2025, together with eliminating 35% of managers who oversee groups of three individuals or fewer, and providing voluntary exit packages throughout a number of divisions since January. Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi signaled late last year that the corporate would proceed to push price cuts “a bit additional,” a mandate that seems unchanged regardless of Alphabet reporting sturdy Q2 2025 outcomes with $96.4 billion in income.

These cuts could save Google mere hundreds; in addition they come as Google faces more and more strained relationships with information publishers. August data from the commerce affiliation Digital Content material Subsequent confirmed median referral site visitors from Google Search to publishers fell 10% between Might and June of this 12 months, with non-news manufacturers experiencing 14% drops.

Main retailers, together with CNN, Enterprise Insider, and HuffPost have reportedly seen even sharper site visitors declines (of 30%, 40%, and 40%, respectively), based on knowledge from SimilarWeb.

Publishers attribute these declines largely to Google’s AI Overviews characteristic, which has diminished click-throughs to exterior web sites from 56% to 69% since its launch, based on Pew Analysis. This spring, Pew analyzed knowledge from 900 U.S. adults, six in ten of whom carried out at the very least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated abstract.

Some would possibly even see Google canceling its FT subscription as akin to a plagiarist refusing to purchase the textbook they’re copying from.

At a Fortune occasion earlier this month, the CEO of the biggest digital and print writer within the U.S. — Neil Vogel of Folks Inc. — didn’t maintain his punches, calling Google a “bad actor” and accusing it of utilizing the identical bot to crawl web sites for its search engine because it does to help its AI options.

In a separate, scathing op-ed this summer time, Digital Content material Subsequent CEO Jason Kint wrote that Google’s AI overviews are making a “zero-click” atmosphere the place “all traffic dead ends at Google.”

Google didn’t reply to a request for remark.