US publishing group People Inc., owner of titles including People magazine, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, and Travel + Leisure, has been very transparent around the impact of AI tools on the traffic it receives across its owned-and-operated properties. Referrals from Google have plummeted, following the introduction of AI overviews into Google’s primary search interface.
That trend has continued into its most recent financial quarter: ‘core sessions’ (which the publisher defines as visits to its most significant owned and operated sites) were down by 22 percent year-on-year, with traffic originating from Google Search down 40 percent. In the past, Google accounted for around two-thirds of People Inc.’s traffic. In the most recent quarter, this was down to 21 percent.
A lot of the group’s commentary on its ‘Google zero’ strategy has focused on what it calls ‘non-session-based’ revenues — i.e., revenues which aren’t tied to site traffic. This includes its investment in off-platform distribution, subscriptions, live events, and licensing, all of which are continuing to grow and helped deliver six percent growth in digital revenues over the past quarter.
But interestingly, despite the steep decline in traffic, People Inc.’s advertising revenues were flat compared with Q2 2025. Programmatic revenues from open marketplaces, which are typically very vulnerable to traffic fluctuations, were actually up year-on-year.
Tim Quinn, People Inc.’s chief financial officer, said there are two factors at play. The company has been packaging up session-based ad inventory in broader deals with non-session-based assets, such as social inventory and live events assets. These sorts of deals have helped keep rates high and protect against traffic falls.
But Quinn also said that as traffic falls and quality inventory becomes more scarce, prices are rising in response. “The second part is a flight to quality […] there is a decreasing supply of quality content on the web, and that quality is commanding a premium,” he said. “We’ve always commanded a premium in the programmatic markets. That premium has increased and is growing.”
Not turning off Google… for now
Sending through lower volumes of traffic isn’t People Inc.’s only issue with Google’s AI tools. Licensing deals with AI companies are proving to be a lucrative source of revenues for the company, but Google remains an outlier. CEO Neil Vogel says that while it’s able to block most AI crawlers through tools provided by Cloudflare, Google is the exception, since it doesn’t separate its AI crawler from its regular search crawler. The company could block Google’s AI scraper, but that would mean disappearing from Google Search.
For the time being, the economics of such a move don’t add up. Google doesn’t deliver traffic like it used to, but 21 percent is still significant.
But Vogel said that turning off Google altogether might be an option if traffic continues to fall, and the pros start to outweigh the cons. “It is a tool that we can use, and it’s something we are constantly looking at. This is a trade-off we’ll monitor,” he said.
“We’re not galloping on a high horse trying to make a point here, what we’re really trying to do is just get to a fair economic deal for the use of our content,” he added. “We will use all the tools at our disposal to do that. We’ll obviously be economically sensible in how we do that.”
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