There is a complex interaction between the circulation of scientific knowledge and the dynamics of online platforms, which influence the ways in which scientific journals and their articles can be searched and cited. This study aims to discuss the challenges of the socio-technical mediations of platforms such as Google and the interference of this mediation process in the information flows of scientific journals. We used web analytics to collect online traffic metrics for scientific articles in an open-access journal in the field of Communication and Information, co-edited by two brazilian universities. We analyzed five audience parameters and, as a result, we saw that specific themes, associated with public figures and subjects that tend to have high search (trend), such as pornography, had a significant impact on the access metrics of the texts in the journal under analysis. This circulation dynamic only happened because the visibility of the scientific production of the journal studied is crossed by Google's ranking algorithm. Therefore, the influence of this platform on the production of knowledge poses a difficulty in achieving epistemic sovereignty, as it reveals the penetration of the private infrastructure of a Big Tech into the visibility of brazilian scientific production.