Google is exploring ways to provide site owners with a way to prevent Google from using their content in Search AI’s productive features including AI Mode and AI Overview. Google said this was based on new requirements from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and any measures must avoid disrupting the way Google Search works.
What Google says. Google wrote:
- “We are now testing updates to our controls to allow sites to directly opt out of AI Search’s productive features.”
Google added that these options cannot break Google Search, Google said:
- “Any new controls need to avoid breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people.”
Posted by CMA. The CMA wrote:
In order to provide certainty to stakeholders, the CMA has published the actions it may take on a roadmap for June 2025. The CMA now discusses the proposed conduct requirements below. Measures are designed to support innovation and growth, to ensure that people benefit from high-quality digital information:
- Publisher controls: Ensuring that content publishers get a fair deal by giving them more choice and transparency in how their content is used Google’s AI Overview. Publishers will be able to opt out of their content used to power AI features such as AI Overview or train AI models outside of Google search. Google will also be required to take practical steps to ensure that publisher content is properly cited in AI results.
- Fairness: Ensuring that Google’s way of ranking search results is fair and transparent to businesses, with an effective process for raising and investigating issues. Google will be required to demonstrate to the CMA and its users that it measures search results appropriately, including its AI Overview and AI Mode.
- Opt-in screens: Making it easier for people to change the search services they use by making auto-opt-in screens on Android phones a legal requirement and introducing opt-in screens in the Chrome browser.
- Data portability: Making it easier for people and businesses to use Google search data.
When is this coming. It is not clear when these new controls are coming but some controls are being adopted. Many publishers, content creators, site owners – want to be able to control if Google uses their content in Search AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. These new controls, whatever they are, will give us more control over how Google uses our content in its features.
Full text. Here’s what Google posted on its blog this morning:
Changing user behavior is rapidly changing how people search for information, and features like AI Overview are helping people discover new content and ask more questions. Today, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a consultation on potential new requirements for Google Search, including the controls we give websites to manage their content in Search AI features. This is a complicated topic because it can affect how people find information and how websites are found in Search.
For years, we’ve given web publishers a range of controls, based on open standards like robots.txt, to manage how their content appears in Search. As technology has evolved, so have our tools. We’ve added controls for things like Captions Included and image previews (which also work in the AI overview). And recently, we introduced Google-Extended, a new control that allows websites to manage how their content is used to train our Gemini models.
Building on this framework, and working with the web ecosystem, we are now testing updates to our controls to allow sites to tap directly into AI Search’s productive features. Our goal is to secure the Search help of people who want information quickly, while giving websites the right tools to manage their content. We look forward to engaging with the CMA process and will continue discussions with website owners and other stakeholders on this topic.
Any new controls need to avoid breaking Search in a way that leads to a patchy or confusing experience for people. As AI increasingly becomes a central part of how people access information, any new controls also need to be simple and intuitive for website owners.
We hope we can find a way forward that provides more choice for website owners and publishers, while ensuring that people continue to have the most useful and innovative Search experience possible.
Why do we care. More controls are arguably better than fewer controls from Google. And SEOs, site owners, publishers, etc. have been asking Google to give us controls on how our content is used in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
These controls may be coming soon – so stay tuned.
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