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

Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Financial Times, and it’s not the only enterprise media subscription on the chopping block, sources say. The cuts reflect broader cost-reduction efforts at the search giant, even as the company reports strong financial performance.

Google has been implementing cost reductions across 2025, including eliminating 35% of managers who oversee teams of three people or fewer, and offering voluntary exit programs across multiple divisions since January. Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi signaled late last year that the company would continue to push cost cuts “a little further,” a mandate that appears unchanged despite Alphabet reporting strong Q2 2025 results with $96.4 billion in revenue.

These cuts may save Google mere thousands; they also come as Google faces increasingly strained relationships with news publishers. August data from the trade association Digital Content Next showed median referral traffic from Google Search to publishers fell 10% between May and June of this year, with non-news brands experiencing 14% drops.

Major outlets, including CNN, Business Insider, and HuffPost have reportedly seen even sharper traffic declines (of 30%, 40%, and 40%, respectively), according to data from SimilarWeb.

Publishers attribute these declines largely to Google’s AI Overviews feature, which has reduced click-throughs to external websites from 56% to 69% since its launch, according to Pew Research. This spring, Pew analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults, six in ten of whom conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary.

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

At a Fortune event earlier this month, the CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. — Neil Vogel of People Inc. — didn’t hold his punches, calling Google a “bad actor” and accusing it of using the same bot to crawl websites for its search engine as it does to support its AI features.

In a separate, scathing op-ed this summer, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint wrote that Google’s AI overviews are creating a “zero-click” environment where “all traffic dead ends at Google.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.