The UK has just imposed legal guardrails on Google’s AI search attack. On Wednesday, Google was announced compliance with UK regulatory requirements, which state that the tech giant must offer publishers a way to opt out of AI search aggregation.
To opt out, publishers will be able to use a new toggle on Google Search Consolea free service that allows website owners to manage their web presence in Google search results.
Once you opt out, the publisher’s website will not appear in Google’s AI Search generator features, such as AI Reviews, AI Mode, or AI Reviews in Discover. (Google, of course, points out in the same announcement that its AI Insights now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and its AI feature has surpassed one billion monthly users.)
The tech giant says it will initially test the opt-out option with a subset of UK publishers before rolling it out globally.
UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) calls the motion to put publishers back in control of how their “world-first” content is used and points out that it will put publishers, including news organizations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google to use their content in AI functions.
The CMA first designated Google as a “strategic market regime” last October, laying the groundwork for future regulations. In Januaryprompted Google to give website publishers the ability to choose whether their content is aggregated into AI search functions or used to train individual AI models.
Alongside the opt-out switch, Google will also now need to make sure that publisher content in AI features is rendered correctly, using clear links. Google suggested that it complies with this as well, noting that it had recently rose the number of embedded links directly in its AI answers and added site previews to encourage users to click.
Google notes that a site’s decision to opt out of its AI search capabilities will not be used as a ranking signal for traditional Google search.
The company will, however, introduce new metrics in its Search Console to influence publishers who might consider opting out, including impression metrics and other information about which of their pages appear in AI responses and in which countries. More metrics will be added over time, Google said.
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