The UK Competition Markets Authority (CMA) announced that web publishers could be enabled to block Google’s AI Overviews from scraping their content.
AI Overviews appears at the top of Google’s search results page as a summarised conversational answer to search queries.
Google also introduced last year AI Mode, which gives a more detailed AI-generated answer to user questions.
The data used to form the AI answers in both of these tools comes from Google’s access to a vast array of web pages, many of which are from news outlets who hold trustworthy and high-quality content.
CMA Carves Out ‘Fairer Deal’
The new rules from the CMA could indicate a step towards granting news publications more authority over when their content is used in AI summaries, proposing a ‘fairer deal’ for publishers.
In a first measure, the CMA said Google would need to fairly rank websites and not prioritise them based on commercial partnerships – Google has denied doing this.
However, some criticised the CMA’s measures for not being enough. Tim Cowen, Co-founder at advocacy group Movement for an Open Web, feels that payment for traffic already lost should be granted to publishers.
He said: “Opting out of AI Overviews in the future won’t change that, it’ll just stop publishers from being able to access the meagre crumbs of traffic that they might get from being present in AIOs.
“What needs to happen is an enforced unbundling and payment for loss of business opportunity by being squeezed out of rankings.”
A Drop in Traffic
News organisations that post their content online have been dramatically impacted by the prevalence of AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
DMG Media, the media company that owns Daily Mail, last year reported an 80-90 percent drop in clicks, because of AI Overviews.
Most major publications have had their content used to train these models without permission or payment, often leading to lucrative licensing agreements being formed between publications and AI models.
So far, websites have been unable to opt out of their content being used in AI Overviews without also being excluded from regular Google search results – forcing news outlets into letting their articles be summarised.
