Google says its test removing European news content for 1% of users in eight EU countries found that there was no change to Search ad revenue due to the removal
techcrunch.com/2025/03/21/g... Jacob Parry / @jacob-parry : Google contends that “European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google,” citing tests of user behaviour. — blog.google/around-the-g... Mastodon: Ian Betteridge / @ianb@mastodon.well.com : Do you think that Google realises that it being able to remove one category of content without any effect on its revenue is a clear demonstration that it's a monopolist? — https://blog.google/... Threads: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : This is obvious to anyone who's worked in search ads; I worked on Bing Ads for 7 years. Google makes money when you search for products or services and click on ads. Searching for DUI lawyers, cell phone plans or credit card applications. No one is buying or clicking on ads related to DOGE stories X: Jason Kint / @jason_kint : People of Flint, Michigan keep drinking the water when they switch supply to the Flint River! A monopolist with 95%+ share claims lowering quality of results for 1% of its users doesn't change their behaviors. Google Research is often good but it is embarrassing when lobbying. [image] LinkedIn: Josh Freeman : And now they are saying the quiet part out loud - Google sees news as worthless to their ads business (while also, somehow … Sarah Thompson : Google conducted an experiment in which it removed news from search results for 1% of users across eight European markets for 2.5 months. … Benedict Evans : Google doesn't need news. — Of course, newspaper industry people claiming the opposite aren't able to hear such things. — https://lnkd.in/eZzQUjq2
Context & Ripple Effects
This result closes the loop on Google’s previously announced EU news-removal experiment, which followed an earlier, narrower test involving the News tab filter. It gives Google an empirical basis for separating the value of news content to users from its direct contribution to Search advertising.
The finding matters because it concerns a core economic question in Google–publisher relations: whether publisher news inventory is commercially material to Search itself, rather than simply part of the service’s broader information supply.
First-order effects
- Google can point to the eight-country, 1% user test as evidence that removing European news content did not measurably affect its Search ad revenue.
- EU publishers whose content was withheld from the test group lose Search distribution to that cohort, while Google’s reported advertising outcome remains unchanged.
Second-order effects
- The result may strengthen Google’s position in discussions over the commercial value of news indexing, because it suggests that any direct Search-advertising cost from excluding this content was not detectable in the test.
- Publishers will have greater incentive to distinguish traffic, audience and public-interest harms from claims about Google’s immediate ad economics; those are not the same measure.
Third-order effects
- If repeated across larger or longer tests, this pattern would indicate that a search platform can reduce news visibility without proportionate short-term advertising exposure, increasing the imbalance in bargaining leverage between platforms and publishers.
- The longer-term question is whether policy and publisher negotiations shift away from ad-revenue arguments toward discoverability, content control and the role of news in answer-oriented search.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from treating publisher content as an essential traffic input to measuring its narrower economic role inside platform-controlled search and answer systems.