Google says its search engine sends billions of clicks to the web every day, and billions more through its AI features every week. Reddit is not waiting to find out whether any of those clicks land on its own pages. The company already has a check from Google in hand, negotiated two years ago, and it is angling for a bigger one.
Independent research backs part of Google’s story and complicates the rest of it. Pew Research Center found a traditional result gets clicked on just 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, versus 15% when it does not. A field experiment from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University measured a 38% drop in organic clicks on AI Overview queries. Neither figure says which sites absorb that gap, or which ones get paid regardless of it.
Google’s Defense Meets an Uncomfortable Denominator
Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge and information, used a LinkedIn post this week to knock down two fears at once. The first was that letting people ask an AI chatbot anything would make search obsolete. The second was that AI-generated answers would kill the click to the underlying website.
On the first point, Fox wrote that people search more, not less, now that they can type in whatever is actually on their minds. On the second, he wrote that Search still sends billions of clicks to the web daily, with billions more arriving weekly through AI-only features. Google has also publicly challenged the methodology behind some of the independent click research.
The post landed as Google finished its largest search redesign in years. At Google I/O 2026, the company folded AI Overviews and AI Mode into one box built on its Gemini 3.5 Flash model, a box that takes longer questions, accepts uploaded photos and documents, and will soon run background AI agents and build small apps directly into results, as The Verge reported. A separate Web tab still holds the traditional list of links.
Google’s aggregate numbers and the independent click-rate research are not really arguing with each other. They are measuring different things, and the gap between them shows up clearest in who sits on which side of it.
| Source | What It Measured | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Google (Nick Fox) | Daily clicks from Search overall | Billions per day |
| Google (Nick Fox) | Weekly clicks from AI features | Billions per week |
| Pew Research Center | Click rate with an AI summary present | 8%, versus 15% without one |
| Pew Research Center | Click rate on links cited inside the summary | 1% of visits |
| Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University | Organic click change on AI Overview queries | 38% drop |
None of those five rows tells you what happens to any specific website. Two other companies already know the answer, because they get paid before the question comes up.
Reddit Turned Citations Into a Line Item
Reddit signed its first data-licensing agreement with Google in February 2024, reported at the time at roughly $60 million a year for access to Reddit posts used in AI training. A parallel deal with OpenAI followed the same year.
Those two agreements have generated more than $200 million in combined value since 2024, according to a Bloomberg report described by Stocktwits in March 2026. The same report said Reddit is now negotiating a new contract with Google, one that would extend beyond training data into how Reddit content gets used inside AI-generated search features themselves.
Reddit’s pitch for that renewal is straightforward: pay scaled to actual use, not a flat annual sum. The company wants its communities compensated in proportion to how much their posts actually influence an AI answer, rather than collecting one fixed check regardless of how often Google’s systems draw on them.
That is a fundamentally different position than the one facing a bakery, a law practice, or a mid-size news site. Reddit is negotiating a price for being cited. Almost nobody else Google cites gets offered a negotiation at all.
Stack Overflow Found the Same Playbook
Reddit was not the only community platform to figure out it was sitting on valuable training data. Stack Overflow struck its own agreement with Google Cloud within weeks of the Reddit news, giving Gemini access to Stack Overflow’s programming questions and answers for coding assistance.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar declined to disclose the price, telling IT Pro’s sister coverage at the time that the non-negotiable terms were trust, accuracy, quality, and attribution back to the sources. He called the arrangement a meaningful new revenue line for the near, medium, and long term. An OpenAI licensing deal followed soon after.
Both companies had already signaled they would charge for bulk data access before either contract existed. Reddit announced plans to charge developers for API access in 2023, months ahead of the Google deal. Stack Overflow made the same move even earlier. Neither waited to be asked.
Wikipedia’s Traffic Is Falling While Its Citations Rise
Wikipedia sits in a stranger spot than either of them. Research from the analytics firm Profound, which examined 680 million AI citations, found that Wikipedia makes up 47.9% of ChatGPT’s ten most-cited sources. Inside Google’s own AI Overviews, the mix flips: Reddit accounts for 21.0% of the top ten citation share and YouTube 18.8%, while Wikipedia’s share drops to just 5.7%.
Whatever the split, none of that citation volume is showing up as visits. The Wikimedia Foundation reported in October 2025 that human pageviews across all language versions of Wikipedia fell 8% year over year, a decline it only caught after updating its bot-detection systems to strip out traffic that had been masquerading as human.
Search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours.
Marshall Miller, senior director of product for core experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in the blog post announcing the decline. Wikipedia does have a commercial data product, Wikimedia Enterprise, launched in 2021 to sell high-volume, service-level-backed access to search and AI companies. But it is not structured as a per-citation fee the way Reddit’s next contract aims to be, and it does not touch the foundation’s core problem: fewer human visits mean fewer volunteers renewing content and fewer individual donors funding the organization that keeps the lights on.
What Happens When There’s No Deal to Cut?
Chegg had no licensing deal to fall back on. The online education company sued Google in February 2025, arguing that AI Overviews used its database of more than 135 million question-and-answer solutions to generate direct answers that never sent students to Chegg’s site at all.
The timing was brutal. Chegg filed its complaint the same day it reported a 24% year-over-year drop in fourth-quarter net revenue. Its stock lost roughly a third of its value within hours. CEO Nathan Schultz told investors Google had shifted from a “search engine” into an “answer engine,” and the company began exploring a sale or going private, with Goldman Sachs advising.
Chegg is not alone in court. Penske Media Corporation has filed a separate suit against Google, and in June 2025 a coalition including the Independent Publishers Alliance, Movement for an Open Web, and Foxglove Legal filed a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission, citing SimilarWeb data showing 37 of the top 50 U.S. news domains lost year-over-year traffic since May 2024, while zero-click searches grew from 56% to 69% over roughly the same period.
It has not been resolved. Google moved to dismiss Chegg’s amended complaint in July 2025, and Chegg’s own regulatory filing from this spring still lists the case as unresolved and in its early stages. In June 2026, Chegg announced it had regained compliance with the New York Stock Exchange’s minimum share price rule without a reverse split, a small reprieve for a stock that has spent more than a year hovering near a dollar.
Regulators Are Circling the Same Numbers
A federal court already found, in a separate 2024 case, that Google holds an illegal monopoly in general search, a ruling Chegg’s lawyers cite directly in arguing their own antitrust claims. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is reviewing a related complaint about AI Overviews and publisher traffic.
None of these proceedings has produced a rule requiring Google to pay publishers for AI citations. Antitrust cases of this size typically take years, and the DOJ monopoly finding itself is still working through remedies. For now, a licensing deal remains something a company has to be big enough, or structurally unique enough, to negotiate for itself.
The Playbook for Everyone Without a Deal
Reddit and Stack Overflow did not wait for Google to offer terms. Both had already begun restricting or charging for bulk access to their own data before any contract existed, which is what gave them something to negotiate over in the first place. That sequence matters more than either company’s specific dollar figure.
- Gate before you negotiate. Reddit and Stack Overflow both moved to charge or restrict bulk scraping ahead of any Google deal, which is what created leverage to negotiate at all.
- Join a coalition instead of going it alone. The European Publishers Council’s complaint and the Independent Publishers Alliance show smaller outlets pooling resources rather than each trying to strike an individual deal with Google.
- Track the court dockets, not just the traffic dashboards. Chegg’s case and the EU complaint are the proceedings most likely to set any future precedent on disclosure or compensation, including for sites too small to sue on their own.
- Build the channels no redesign can touch. Email lists, direct-navigation brand searches, and communities do not depend on whether an AI Overview decides to link out this week.
The businesses with the least room to maneuver are the ones the original conversation about Google’s numbers was supposed to be about in the first place: the bakery, the law practice, the SaaS product that never had 135 million question-and-answer pairs or a decade of structured community posts to sell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wikipedia paid the same way Reddit is when AI cites its content?
No. Wikipedia’s commercial arm, Wikimedia Enterprise, sells high-volume data access to search and AI companies, but that program is not a per-citation fee tied to how often an answer engine quotes an article. Reddit’s arrangement pays a set sum regardless of citation volume, and its next contract aims to tie pay to actual use. Wikipedia’s core budget still depends on donations driven by human visits, the exact traffic the Wikimedia Foundation says AI answers are diverting.
Why did Chegg sue Google instead of signing a licensing deal?
Chegg’s complaint argues it never had that option on offer. The company says Google conditioned search visibility on access to its content rather than proposing a paid arrangement like the ones struck with Reddit and Stack Overflow. Google moved to dismiss the amended complaint in July 2025, and the case remains open in federal court in Washington as of Chegg’s most recent regulatory filing.
Can a small business or blogger get paid when Google’s AI cites their site?
Not currently, and not easily. Reddit and Stack Overflow each hold millions of structured, continuously updated posts valuable for training and grounding AI models at a scale no single small business or blog can match. Without that scale, the realistic options are structural rather than contractual, built around direct traffic and owned audiences instead of a negotiated fee.
Could regulators eventually force Google to pay more publishers?
It is possible but not close. A federal antitrust ruling already found Google holds an illegal monopoly in search, a decision Chegg’s lawyers cite directly. A coalition of European publishers filed a formal antitrust complaint over AI Overviews in mid-2025, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is reviewing a related complaint. So far, none of these cases has produced a mandate for compensation, and cases this size usually take years.
