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

[ad_1] Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Monetary Instances, 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, whilst the corporate studies robust monetary efficiency.

Google has been implementing value reductions throughout 2025, together with eliminating 35% of managers who oversee groups of three folks or fewer, and providing voluntary exit applications throughout a number of divisions since January. Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi signaled late final 12 months that the corporate would proceed to push value cuts “just a little additional,” a mandate that seems unchanged regardless of Alphabet reporting robust Q2 2025 outcomes with $96.4 billion in income.

These cuts could save Google mere hundreds; additionally they come as Google faces more and more strained relationships with information publishers. August knowledge from the commerce affiliation Digital Content material Subsequent confirmed median referral visitors from Google Search to publishers fell 10% between Could 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 visitors declines (of 30%, 40%, and 40%, respectively), in accordance with knowledge from SimilarWeb.

Publishers attribute these declines largely to Google’s AI Overviews characteristic, which has lowered click-throughs to exterior web sites from 56% to 69% since its launch, in accordance with 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 may 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 most important digital and print writer within the U.S. — Neil Vogel of Folks Inc. — didn’t maintain his punches, calling Google a “unhealthy actor” and accusing it of utilizing the identical bot to crawl web sites for its search engine because it does to assist its AI options.

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