Brussels is asking publishers whether Google’s AI opt-out is any use

Google gave publishers a way to opt out of its AI search features in June without affecting their ordinary search rankings.

The European Commission has spent the summer trying to work out whether that option actually gives publishers any meaningful choice.

The Commission sent publishers a questionnaire in July, with a deadline of August 28, asking whether they planned to use the opt-out, what would make them use it and how they viewed Google’s decision in May to combine AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single AI Search experience, Reuters reported.

The question of whether publishers will actually use the opt-out is central to the whole exercise.

If publishers cannot realistically use it without losing traffic, then the existence of an opt-out does not necessarily give them much control over how Google uses their content.

Publishers are effectively choosing between two unattractive options. Staying in Google’s AI search means allowing their reporting to be used in summaries that can answer a reader’s question without a click, while opting out protects the content from those summaries at the cost of potentially losing visibility on the part of the search page that users increasingly see first.

The complaint behind the regulatory scrutiny has remained largely the same for the past two years.

Google places AI-generated answers above traditional links, which can give users enough information to satisfy their search without visiting the publisher whose reporting or analysis helped provide that answer.

Google’s decision to introduce the global opt-out in June also came at a convenient moment.

The company announced it on the same day that the UK ordered it to offer publishers such an option, effectively turning a requirement from one national regulator into a change applied across Google’s search business.

The problem with the mechanism is fairly straightforward. If AI summaries are becoming a more prominent part of search, then refusing to appear in them can also mean giving up some of the visibility publishers are trying to protect.

Publishers therefore have to weigh the value of preventing their content from being summarised against the traffic they might lose by doing so.

Google’s decision in May to bring AI Overviews and AI Mode together also matters because it changes what publishers are opting out of.

Combining the two features into a single AI Search experience gives publishers fewer distinct parts of the search page that they can choose to participate in or avoid.

Publishers have been challenging Google’s use of their content through several different channels. French media organisations have asked their competition authority to make Google pay for using their content in AI-generated answers, while a German court found Google liable over its AI Overviews.

Regulators in the UK, Germany and France are therefore examining versions of the same problem through different legal mechanisms.

The UK has used conduct requirements, Germany has relied on the courts, and France has taken the issue to its competition authority, while Brussels is still working out whether the existing EU framework requires a more formal intervention.

The traffic figures are one reason the issue has become difficult to dismiss. Publishers have reported click declines of up to 58%, and the impact has already contributed to antitrust litigation against Google.

Google has accumulated more than €10 billion in EU antitrust fines over almost two decades, which provides the background against which its latest concessions are being assessed.

The company has also recently agreed to suspend manual spam demotions across the European Economic Area in an attempt to avoid a separate Digital Markets Act case.

Taken together, the concessions suggest that Google is willing to change individual parts of how its search products operate when regulators challenge them.

The bigger question for publishers is whether those changes alter the basic economics of a search engine that can increasingly answer a query itself rather than sending the user to the site that produced the information.

There is also a basic imbalance that an opt-out cannot easily resolve. Google controls the search interface, the ranking system and the AI features appearing within it, so it can decide both what options publishers are offered and how those options affect their visibility.

That helps explain why some publishers are pushing for compensation rather than simply asking for the ability to withdraw.

The Commission’s next step will depend partly on what publishers said in their responses.

The questionnaire itself is not an investigation, but it gives Brussels a way to establish whether publishers consider Google’s opt-out meaningful and whether there is enough evidence to justify opening a formal competition inquiry.

For European publishers, the timing creates a particularly awkward situation. The Commission is examining whether Google’s solution to AI search concerns is adequate while the company is making a separate concession over search rankings, yet neither process directly addresses the question of whether publishers should receive compensation when their content is used to generate AI answers.

Publishers had until August 28 to respond. Whatever they told the Commission, they were answering a question in which both available choices carry a cost: staying in Google’s AI search can mean giving up clicks, while opting out can mean giving up visibility.