Reach chief executive Piers North. Picture: Reach
Reach has not been overly reliant on Google Discover but took “advantage of opportunities as they come”, chief executive Piers North said after traffic from the newsfeed fell by almost 50% in the second half of 2025.
North spoke to Press Gazette on Tuesday morning after Reach revealed profit was up 2% to £104.7m in 2025 , despite revenue falling 4% to £518.4m .
Part of the revenue hit came from falling traffic from Google Discover, the smartphone news and content aggregation platform that appears by default on Android phones and in the Google app on other devices. By 2024 Discover was Reach’s biggest single referrer of traffic.
This took indirect (programmatic and social) revenue into decline of 8% in Q4 following three months of consecutive growth.
Asked if Reach had been too reliant on Google Discover traffic, North said: “It’s a chicken and egg situation, isn’t it: you can’t be too reliant unless you have some success.”
He said Reach was “clear eyed that, like any business, you take advantage of opportunities as they come. The one strength that Reach has is we’re very flexible.
“This doesn’t matter whether we go back to the early days of social, early days of search, early days of Discover, we will make sure we use all disposable assets to maximise the reach of our content.”
North added: “What you have to be clear about is that you will win and you will lose. And clearly, we had significant success at the back half of 2024 and into 2025 and it’s less successful now, but it is also a reminder we are still significant players in Discover, and we are significant players in the UK media market.”
North noted Discover “has been very volatile and what has worked for us in the past has not worked for us in the more recent past”.
Previously Discover frequently picked up first-person pieces, lifestyle content, niche interest articles and non-football sport reports from across Reach sites. It was less strong for hard news.
North said it is not known why Discover has declined so much “because we don’t get to see the workings out” but that it appears to be related to Google’s “realignment around the AI world” and changes to sources getting traction in organic search results.
Research from newsroom analytics provider Marfeel published by Press Gazette in January revealed that Youtube results and X posts appeared to be taking space on Discover which previously went to news publishers.
North said: “Obviously we know they’re favouring the likes of Reddit more in Google Search and also that is flowing through to Discover, which kind of suggests that the two are linked. So it’s impossible for us to draw hard and fast links.”
Google search traffic for Reach stable despite AI Overviews rollout
Many publishers are seeing a drop in Google Search traffic due to AI Overviews appearing at the top of search results meaning users often don’t need to click through to find the information they need.
But North said search traffic for Reach is “relatively stable” as it has traditionally had “much less traffic from organic search than we have from Discover”.
Despite the Google challenges, other platforms have seen a boost in 2025.
At the start of 2026 Facebook began prioritising news for the first time in years and also began paying content creators for engagement generated on the platform.
North said Facebook is “seeing good growth” both in monetisation “within their environment” and via referral traffic. Whatsapp and other platforms also had a good year, he said, with social referrals up 21% overall to make up 27% of traffic.
“But again, it’s all about making sure we’ve got a mixed economy – social, search. Direct is still really important. Obviously, that’s about a fifth of our traffic, we need that to get more.”
Newsletters and the premium paywalls now being rolled out are a “key part” of building direct traffic, he added.
Subscriptions (which keep most content free but give unlimited access to premium content and ad-light reading) are expected to be rolled out on the “bulk” of Reach sites by the end of 2026, North said. He said the exceptions will likely be some of the smaller local titles.
Reach prepared for ‘courtship and courts’ with AI companies
Reach announced in the past week it has signed its first AI deal, with Amazon agreeing to pay every time its content is used by voice assistant Alexa and the Nova AI model.
North said Reach has also had “good conversations” with Google and Facebook owner Meta but others are “being less receptive” but it is “engaged with all of them to a greater or lesser extent”.
Reach has engaged consultants on the West Coast of the US to be closer to the tech giants and help it take part in these conversations.
Press Gazette understands Reach is considering pursuing legal action against ChatGPT owner OpenAI.
North said Reach’s approach will be a “mixture of courtship and courts”.
He said: “We’re willing to have conversations, but they need to lean in and if they’re not willing to lean in, then they need to respect the boundaries and the ‘do not step on the grass’ signs that we put up on the content, because we believe in that sense of IP and copyright.”
North said it is hard to block AI scrapers both because they can ignore the signals saying they are not welcome and because Reach syndicates and licenses its content meaning it can be hard to know where AI platforms are taking the information from.
“We’re very clear that there needs to be a value exchange for the content that is being acquired and/or scraped by those AI machines. It’s in their interest, because AI can do a lot of amazing things, but it still needs analysis [and] information fed into it to be accurate.”
Reach CEO expects 2026 to be ‘defining year’
North also discussed the new “NATO for news” style group launched by the BBC, Sky News, The Telegraph, The Guardian and the Financial Times last week in order to set industry standard terms on AI scraping and payment.
North told staff in a memo Reach was speaking to SPUR and similar organisations in the US as it is “important to work together with the rest of the industry on this but we need to make sure we find the right fit”.
North told Press Gazette this hesitation is based around what would be required of Reach if it took part.
“Obviously we need to be very clear that if there is the requirement for resource, AKA money, or cash, what is the clear output of that return?”
He added: “We are broadly supportive of the initiative. I think anytime the industry works together it is only a good thing, but we just need to make sure… if this is about conversations and collaboration, then that’s fine. If it’s around investment and resource, then we just need to make sure that we’re clear about what the outcomes are.”
Former chief revenue officer North became chief executive of Reach in March last year, meaning he is approaching the end of his first year at the helm.
He said he is “really excited about the future” but that he does not “downplay the challenges we’re going to have certainly in the next few months” as year-on-year comparisons with 2025 traffic look negative.
“But I think that for me this is going to be a really defining year,” he said. “There’s always the danger you overegg the years, but it does feel the next 12 to 18 months is going to be fascinating from a media perspective.”
Reach made around 200 editorial redundancies in 2025 as it cut costs, reorganised around a shared live news desk and centralised sports team , and invested instead in areas like video.
This will contribute to a planned 5-6% reduction in adjusted operating costs in 2026 as well as the planned closure of two out of three of its remaining printing operations.
Asked about potential further cuts, North said: “It is hard to predict the future. I can’t rule anything in or out.
“Clearly, we need to respond as the market responds… whether you’re agency side, adtech side, publisher side, there’s huge changes going on, and we will respond accordingly.”
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