• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, August 5, 2025

WalletHub has removed 40,000 pages of financial content from the reach of Google and other AI search engines, locking it behind a paywall just for the company’s users.

Advancements in AI search and large language models (LLMs) are forcing this shift, causing publishers to once again lockdown data.

OpenAI on Tuesday launched two open-weight AI reasoning models available to download for free from the online developer platform Hugging Face.

Open-weight AI reasoning models are LLMs where the core "weights" or parameters that determine how the model processes information are publicly available.

I asked Google AI Mode why advertisers and marketers should care about these new models. It told me “GPT-OSS models demonstrate strong performance on reasoning tasks, tool use, and few-shot function calling, enabling them to handle complex marketing challenges like competitive analysis and strategic planning.”

WalletHub said the move addresses anticompetitive practices and aims to keep Google and other AI companies from accessing the content.

Several factors have contributed to publishers facing financial difficulties and even closure. But if companies like WalletHub choose to restrict their financial content from AI search engines, it could change search models and alter potential revenue growth.

While paywalls can generate revenue from subscriptions, it comes with the risk of reduced website traffic. Some publishers, as we’ve seen in the recent past, are willing to take that chance.

Odysseas Papadimitriou, WalletHub CEO, believes that “Google went from organizing the world’s information to stealing it, taking a sledgehammer to the implied contract that the open web has relied on.”

Hardships include the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), a major distributor for small presses, but are not limited to smaller presses. Publishers Clearing House (PCH) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on April 9, 2025, as part of a restructuring plan, though they plan to continue their online business. 

WalletHub released survey results Tuesday showing that consumers are not happy and voiced concerns about the potential downsides. To get a more complete picture, WalletHub conducted a national online survey of 200 respondents, and normalized the data by age, gender and income so the sample would reflect U.S. demographics.

Turns out 62% of survey respondents believe in fair pay for creators, and that it should be illegal for AI companies to use people’s work without compensation. Along the same lines, nine in 10 think all AI content should have a prominent disclosure.

More interestingly, two out of three Americans think AI companies should be sued for giving inaccurate answers to queries, and about four out of five say they trust human experts more than AI.

Eighty-three percent of people participating in the survey think they will get manipulated if search results get replaced by answers from AI, and three out of five people say they are not comfortable taking financial or medical advice from AI, which, in my opinion, is a good decision.