Search Growth Slows as Publishers Consider Leaving Google

Alphabet’s Q2 2026 earnings revealed Google Search & other revenue climbed 17% year over year to $63.27 billion, though this marks a slight deceleration from the 19% growth seen in Q1, breaking a four-quarter streak of acceleration. On the earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Gemini 4, now in pretraining, as the model Google needs to stay competitive at the frontier. Pichai noted that “popular AI features are driving Search query growth,” while Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler credited strong retail performance for the uptick. Alphabet also raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion, with Pichai specifically naming coding and agentic coding as areas requiring improvement.

Why This Matters: Search continues generating billions each quarter, and Google attributes this to its AI surfaces. The growth slowdown is just one data point, not a definitive trend, but it arrives alongside a massive spending increase designed to make AI the engine of a business that grew slightly slower. The outcome of this bet will determine which surfaces you optimize for and which ad formats reach your audience.

In a separate legal development, a federal judge dismissed Google’s DMCA claims against SerpApi, ruling that blocking automated access to public search results doesn’t constitute copyright circumvention when those results contain no copyrighted content. The judge granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss both anti-circumvention claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Claims involving results without copyrighted content were dismissed without leave to amend, while those involving licensed images were dismissed with permission for Google to amend within 21 days. The court rejected SerpApi’s argument that Google lacked standing to sue, finding Google plausibly alleged circumvention of its SearchGuard system.

Why This Matters: Many tools practitioners rely on, from rank trackers to SERP monitors, depend on scraped search results. This ruling largely favored those tools, holding that bypassing an access control isn’t a DMCA violation when the results behind it lack copyrighted content. Google can still amend its narrower claims, and a district court order doesn’t bind other courts, but the decision provides language for scraping-based tools to cite.

What People Are Saying: Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, wrote on X: “If you crawl the web, or rely on any product that does, you should be deeply grateful to @serpapi today.” Independent SEO consultant Nick LeRoy posted: “I’m not as anti-Google as most, but this is a fantastic victory for the industry (thanks @serpapi).” Lily Ray, founder of Algorythmic, reacted on LinkedIn: “Wow, the Google lawsuit against SerpAPI was dismissed 🤯 I wonder if we will see more Google scraping from the LLMs and tracking tools now… And a lot more noise in our GSC reporting 😕.”

Meanwhile, publishers are putting conditions on staying in Google Search. USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed told Adweek the company is prepared to delist from Google within the next six to twelve months. A Wall Street Journal report this week said Reddit is reevaluating its $60 million per year licensing deal with Google, Politico and Reuters are considering limits on Google’s crawler, and People Inc. described blocking Google entirely as an option.

Why This Matters: Major publishers are now publicly stating what it would take to leave. If licensing becomes the answer, the value of content in Google’s index shifts from an assumed trade for traffic to a negotiated number. Those negotiations could set the terms smaller publishers receive.

What People Are Saying: Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy, wrote on LinkedIn: “The reward to publishers is no longer there, and still declining.” Former Ad Age editor Jack Neff, reacting on LinkedIn to Adweek’s earlier report, raised the cost side: “If publishers blocking Google crawlers becomes widespread, I do truly fear how much worse the quality of AI Overviews can become as Gemini access to professional content gets further throttled.”

In Europe, the European Commission fined Google €890 million on July 23, its first penalties under the Digital Markets Act, one week after adopting binding decisions requiring Google to share anonymized search data with rivals. The Commission issued a €460 million fine for favoring Google’s own shopping, hotel, transport, and sports results over comparable third-party services, and a €430 million fine for restricting developers from steering users outside Google Play. The separate July 16 decisions require Google to share anonymized query, click, view, and results-position data with eligible rivals, including AI chatbots that qualify as search engines, and to open Android to competing assistants.

Why This Matters: The self-preferencing finding puts EU results-page layout under a compliance deadline, meaning how Google displays its services against third-party listings could change within 60 days. The data-sharing decisions could eventually widen which search engines and chatbots can build competitive retrieval systems, and with that, who cites sources and sends referral traffic. Neither decision changes rankings on its own, and what becomes visible will depend on how Google complies.

Theme Of The Week: Everyone Is Renegotiating With Google. Google faces pressure from three directions: a court ruling, publisher negotiations, and EU enforcement. The court dismissed Google’s DMCA claims involving search results without copyrighted content, easing legal pressure. Publishers like USA Today Co. say they may leave Google Search within six to twelve months, and others are weighing crawler limits or licensing terms, increasing commercial pressure. At the center, Google reported $63.27 billion in Q2 Search & other revenue, up 17% year over year, with a $195–205 billion 2026 capex forecast. The European Commission added regulatory pressure with €890 million in DMA fines, plus separate decisions setting search-data sharing and Android requirements.

Every story this week involves a party redrawing its deal with Google. A federal court narrowed which legal tools Google can use against companies that collect its results. Publishers are turning their presence in the index into a negotiation. The EU is fining how Google lays out its results page while compelling its search data outward. And the earnings show what sits on Google’s side of the table: a $63 billion quarter from Search with record spending riding on AI. The exchange that defined the open web for two decades, content and access in return for traffic, is being repriced from every direction at once.