The lead  ·  01

Once unimaginable — publishers are preparing to opt out of Google Search

USA Today Inc. CEO Mike Reed told Adweek the company is prepared to delist from Google within six to twelve months, having already signed licensing deals with Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. People Inc.

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The week in one paragraph

This was the week the leverage turned. Last week the story was that the numbers had stopped adding up — supply contracting, measurement failing, publishers building their own meters. This week publishers, regulators and courts all reached for the switch. USA Today Inc. said it is prepared to delist from Google Search within six to twelve months, People Inc. said blocking Google is “100% on the table,” and Reddit is reportedly weighing cutting Google off from a ~$60M-a-year data deal — a threat that only exists because USA Today has already signed licensing agreements with Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. The regulators moved in the same direction: the European Commission fined Google €890M under the DMA and ordered structural changes to how Search presents its own services, eight days after the July 16 specification decisions; a bipartisan bill would force AI crawlers to identify themselves, with FTC enforcement, against a backdrop where 57.4% of all web requests are now automated; and children’s privacy quietly became the strictest regime in digital advertising, applying by audience rather than by intent. A federal judge halted the $110B Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger two days before closing — brought by 12 state attorneys general, not by any federal agency. Meanwhile Alphabet posted a $119.8B quarter in which the Google Network segment — the open web’s line item — declined, and advertising drew zero questions in investor Q&A against 28 mentions of TPUs. Where publishers built rather than blocked, the news was better: the IAB Tech Lab finalised programmatic signalling for pause, menu and four other CTV formats, beehiiv launched a programmatic layer for newsletters on an SSP it built itself, and Paramount decided prestige drama was worth trading for an email address. One thread ties it together: for the first time in a decade, the party with something to withhold is not always the platform.