Google sent Reach 46% fewer readers. Now 220 journalists are losing their jobs
The company behind the Mirror, the Express and the Liverpool Echo is cutting 220 editorial jobs. The reason is not a scandal or a takeover — it is that people read the AI answer at the top of the search page and never click.
When you type a question into Google now, an AI-written answer often sits at the top. You read it, you get what you needed, you close the tab. Nobody clicked anything. On Wednesday, we found out what that looks like from the other side of the screen: Reach, the publisher of the Mirror, the Express, the Daily Star, the Daily Record, the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo, said it is cutting 220 editorial jobs.
The company's own number is the part worth holding on to. Traffic coming from Google fell 46% year on year, which Reach blamed on Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews — features that, in its words, negate the need for readers to click through to its websites. Three online-only titles are being shut: KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo. This is not the first round. In September the company put 600 roles at risk and ended up cutting more than 300 editorial jobs.
For two years the argument about AI and jobs has been mostly theoretical: models will get good enough, and then something will happen to somebody's work. Here the chain is short enough to see end to end. Google changes what the top of a search page looks like. Half the visitors stop arriving. The money that came with those visitors stops arriving too. 220 people are told their jobs are going. No robot wrote a single article to replace them — the machine simply stood between the reader and the writer and answered first.
That is the mechanism to remember, because it is not specific to journalism. Anyone whose income depends on a stranger finding them through a search — a plumber with a website, a recipe blog, a small shop, a tutor, a comparison site, a freelance developer with a portfolio page — sits in the same position. You are not being replaced. You are being summarised.
The middleman learned to answer the question himself.
Reach's answer is to stop chasing volume. David Higgerson, the company's chief content officer, told staff there would be "less emphasis on story volume and more on original journalism and distinctive brands", and that Reach will drop page views as its main measure in favour of "active engaged time" — how long people actually stay. About 60 new editorial roles are being created, aimed at subscriptions and longer-form video. Translated: if strangers passing through no longer pay the bills, you need people who come back on purpose and pay directly. Reach has 50,000 paying digital subscribers and wants 75,000 by the end of this financial year. Against 2,494 editorial and production staff, that is a very thin rope to climb.
Anyone starting out in a job where being found online is the job — journalism, copywriting, SEO, social media, small online shops, freelancers whose work arrives through search. The entry-level version of that work was always "produce a lot, fast, and hope it ranks", and Reach just said out loud that it wants less volume. Also anyone choosing what to study right now on the assumption that writing for the internet is a safe first salary. And, less obviously, everyone in Kent, Aberdeen and Galway who read KentLive, AberdeenLive or GalwayBeo for what was happening on their own street — those three sites are closing, and the AI summary at the top of the page has nothing local to summarise once nobody is there writing it.
Two numbers will tell you whether this works. Reach says it has 50,000 paid digital subscribers and is targeting 75,000 by the end of its current financial year — that is the target to check against. The other is digital revenue, which fell by almost 1% to £128.9m in the year to 3 March. If subscriptions grow and that line still falls, the cuts were not the fix. Reach has not said when the 220 jobs go, and it has not said whether more rounds follow.
Reach's share price is down 90% over five years, and the company still employed 3,423 people on average last year with a £208.5m wage bill. The AI answer box did not appear as a villain in anyone's business plan. It just quietly took the part of the job that paid — the click — and left the part that costs money, which is someone going out and finding something out. Somebody still has to do that. Nobody has yet explained who pays them.
Sources: The Guardian, «Mirror publisher to cut 220 editorial jobs as readers turn to AI summaries», 16 September 2026 (Mark Sweney).
Впервые видно в цифрах, как ответы ИИ в поиске напрямую уничтожают рабочие места: минус 46% переходов из Google — и 220 журналистов на улице, а следом та же логика придёт к любому, чей заработок зависит от кликов.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections