Google's AI-Driven News Feed Faces Backlash from Publishers
Google's AI-powered recommendation engine, Discover, has been sending millions of readers to Mongabay's core news sites. In the first eight months of 2026, referrals from Discover climbed from 9 million to 46 million.
Mongabay's CEO, Rhett Ayers Butler, notes that this trend is a welcome development for the non-profit conservation and environmental science platform. However, Google has recently announced that it is testing a change called 'Dive Deeper' that could be devastating to publishers.
The 'Dive Deeper' feature would display AI-generated summaries of news articles instead of snippets that take users directly to publishers' stories. If implemented, this change could lead many niche publishers to block Googlebot from their sites or put content behind paywalls.