Recent Google changes will result in a 'jobs bloodbath' in online publishing and supporting infrastructure in Q1 2026.

Online publishing is at a critical point as Google has clearly crossed the Rubicon and decided to change the nature of the internet to favour its own products and bottom line - and simply because it can. In my opinion, Google no longer even pretends to care about online publishers or the industry as a whole.

With referral traffic to publishers from traditional Google Search having fallen, in some rare cases by up to 90%, over the last two years, many publishers were only kept alive by referral traffic from Google Discover, a platform that allowed readers to be in control of the content they would see.

This has now changed. Google Discover is now full of AI Overviews, ads, Google-owned YouTube videos, and X posts (Google has an ad deal with X). Readers are telling us that their Discover feeds have become nothing more than a Google propaganda product, and that Google has lost sight of what its users actually want to see.

GRV Media, once a poster child for small/medium-sized online publishers, has had to let 60 content creators go in the last four months, as it cut costs by a third. Google clearly has a massive influence on the future of the internet, and surely, as a monopoly in many jurisdictions, it has a responsibility to the wider online publishing ecosystem.

Having seemingly decided to move solely in its own interest, however, I believe that the internet as we know it will be gone during the first few months of 2026. Every single small/medium-sized publisher that I have spoken to claims to have recently lost at least 50% of its traffic from Google, and plans job cuts in Q1, unless things change. GRV Media has gone from 112,000,000 pageviews in July to 32,000,000 last month. In my view, Google's actions have broken the internet, and there is currently no financially sustainable business model for the smaller players.