You can’t ignore Google Zero anymore
On The Vergecast: Google vs. websites, OpenAI vs. Hugging Face, and Ford’s deal with Apple Maps.
by David Pierce
Jul 24, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC
David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
The web and Google once had a deal: Google collects data and indexes webpages and in exchange sends oceans of traffic to websites. The deal wasn’t perfect and certainly made Google more money than it made the websites, but it worked for a long time. Now, however, the deal seems to be dead. And the web is being forced to reckon with what happens when the Google traffic dries up.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about the week’s Google Zero news, including Reddit’s interest in getting out of an AI training deal...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to theverge.com. To see the full text click HERE
