How Much is News Worth to Google?

Online news publishers have long claimed that ad sellers like Google profit unfairly from their content. In some places, publishers have successfully lobbied for government legislation to oblige Google to share revenue. But now, the results of a recent experiment by Google are likely to add fuel to the controversy over who should pay for news.

For years, publishers have complained that they lose ad dollars to platforms like Google and Facebook that rely on publishers to create content that people search for using those platforms. As digital advertising revenue grew, more and more of it went to aggregators like Google than to the creators, creating a crisis for newsrooms. In some places, governments stepped in, forcing Google to pay up. Now, Google wants to prove that news has little value for its business model.

Google experiments with dropping news

In November of 2024, Google began an experiment in the European Union. It decided to remove news articles from EU-based publishers from its search results. Google says the test was an effort to supply more data to regulators and publishers: “To meet this request, we will be running a small, time-limited test in which we don't show results from EU-based news publishers in Google News, Search, and Discover. This test will affect 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.”

Note that the test did not run in France or Germany, where Google already faces antitrust scrutiny and fines. French authorities warned Google that it would be fined for breaking a prior agreement. Meanwhile, the search giant has to tread lightly in Germany, where the competition authority is keeping a close eye, and any effort to undercut E.U. copyright law could result in further scrutiny.

This isn’t the first time Google has dropped publishers in specific locations. As The Verge reports, “Google most recently removed links to California news outlets in response to the state’s Journalism Preservation Act. Google also threatened to remove links to local news outlets in Canada and nearly pulled its search engine from Australia over similar legislation.” So, EU publishers have good reason to think they could be next on the chopping block and are undoubtedly keeping a close eye on the result.

The results are in (but are they?)

After the two-and-a-half-month experiment Google reported what seemed like bad news for publishers: “The data showed that Search ad revenue did not change despite daily average users (DAUs) declining by 0.8 percent, which is consistent with users continuing to use Google for more commercial queries even as they used it less for news queries. The overall ad revenue impact across Search, Discover, Display Ads and other Google properties also could not be statistically distinguished from zero, either overall or by country.”

However, not everyone is buying the validity of these results.

As the Press Gazette’s Chris Duncan points out, the study left out some of the biggest ad markets in the E.U.: “IAB numbers from 2022 have the eight selected countries at 35% of the digital ad market of the EU, compared to Germany plus France at 43%.” Therefore, the sample audience is immediately called into question. The timeframe also raises questions among critics. Press Gazette points out that the news cycle from November of 2024 to January of 2025 was largely dominated by the US presidential election, the sources for which would largely be US-based news organizations, not local EU publishers. Additionally, “Timing of the study covered Black Friday through to Christmas and then the January sales period, covering the highest revenue peaks for Google in non-news revenues.” Meanwhile, test subjects had no idea they were part of a test.

Inconclusive?

For all of these reasons and more, critics are calling foul on Google’s test and its results. Based on the final data, Duncan suggests a revised statement on the outcome: “Removing [some sources] of news content for [1% of customers] in Search [without notifying] those customers has no measurable impact on [overall] ad revenue for Google.”

In other words, further research is warranted.