Why is Google so hard to stop it? Why publishers have no choice but to remain in the product and what are they going to do if they decide to opt out
When AI Overviews rolled out last year, Google decided to “silently update” the information about publisher controls with “no public announcement,” according to the document. Guidance on how to say the update is confusing, and could be due to the fact that Google made it hard for publishers to know what they were actually opting out of.
Publishers were given an ultimatum at a May 2nd court hearing. Eli Collins, vice president of product for DeepMind, said that it doesn’t apply to search-specific features in the product, even though it was introduced as a way for publishers to opt out. The only way for publishers to avoid AI Overviews sucking up their content is to opt out of being crawled by Googlebot — which stops their website being indexed for Search altogether.
In a new tab within Search, the company announced that it was expanding Artificial Intelligence Mode to all users in the US. When users enter a query, AI Mode serves up an AI-generated response alongside a list of relevant links.
“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News/Media Alliance, said in the statement. It is a theft if GOOGLE takes content by force and uses it with no return. The DOJ needs to address this in order to prevent domination of the internet.
According to, Liz Reid said during testimony that allowing publishers to opt out of individual features would add enormous complexity. “By saying a publisher could be like, ‘I want to be in this feature but not that feature,’ it doesn’t work,” Reid said. “Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.”