Reddit CEO Steve Huffman used the company's second-quarter earnings call to do something unusual: publicly question the value of Google's AI Overviews. In a context where the platform saw its shares fall more than 20% even after beating financial expectations, Huffman argued that AI-generated summaries have yet to deliver the same positive impact as the traditional 'ten blue links'.
The statement comes at a time when Reddit is evaluating ending its content licensing agreement with Google, worth around $60 million. According to Wall Street Journal reports, Reddit is not alone — The Economist, Reuters, Politico and USA Today are also said to be considering cutting ties with the search company. At the heart of the dispute is the economy of referral traffic: if AI summarizes content right on the results page, who still needs to click through to the original site?
For many publishers, the answer is no one. A 2025 Pew Research study, based on data from 900 American adults, concluded that AI Overviews cut Google referral traffic to websites by nearly half, compared with the traditional approach. Google, for its part, counters that the study's methodology is flawed and that the volume of organic clicks from Google Search to websites has remained stable year over year. The truth, as often happens, lies somewhere in between, and it is hard to know who is right without access to each side's proprietary numbers.
For Reddit, the issue is existential. The platform built a business model in which search traffic fuels its growth — and the quality of human content is precisely what sets it apart in a landscape increasingly flooded with synthetic material. Huffman described Reddit as the 'antidote to an automated web', arguing that people do not want a summary of Reddit; they want Reddit itself. It is a bold bet: the platform also has a deal with OpenAI, trying to balance the relationship between distribution and monetization of content.
There is a structural irony in this dispute. Google had long since moved away from pure 'ten blue links', with features such as featured snippets and knowledge panels. AI Overviews are just the most radical evolution of that trend. The problem is that the more the search engine answers questions on its own, the smaller the incentive becomes for publishers to produce content — which, in the end, degrades the very source that AI consumes to generate its summaries. It is a cycle that can feed back destructively.
The situation remains unresolved, and attempts at change have been timid. Cloudflare tried to change the robots.txt default to pressure Google, and the search company itself made adjustments to give more prominence to external links. But Google insists AI Overviews are here to stay. The question hanging in the air is which major publisher will be the next to cut its deal — and whether, at some point, the combined pressure from publishers will force Google to rethink a model that is hollowing out the economics of the open web. In the meantime, the economics of discovery are being rewritten in real time, and whoever controls the answer box may end up controlling the attention economy.
Sources: Ars Technica, CNBC, Startup Fortune
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