Google Doesn’t Want to Give Publishers the Choice to Leave Search. A Comment on a Google I/O Observation of the News/Media Alliance

Google didn’t want to give publishers the choice to keep their content out of AI Search results because it’s “evolving into a space for monetisation.” An internal document, which was spotted byBloomberg, shows that a discussion took place about offering publishers more control over the use of their website data in search and how it could be used.

Publishers face an ultimatum according to a court hearing on May 2nd. Eli Collins, vice president of product at Deep Mind, explained that the way for publishers to opt out of training doesn’t apply to search-specific products. 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.

During Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced that it’s expanding AI Mode to all users in the US, which appears in a new tab directly within Search. When users look at a list of links, the responses come from an artificial intelligence created by the user.

Danielle Coffey, CEO and president of News/Media Alliance said that links were the last good quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. The definition of theft is when Content is taken by force and used with no return. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”

During her testimony, the head of Search said that allowing publishers to opt out of individual features would be a lot of work. “By saying a publisher could be like, ‘I want to be in this feature but not that feature,’ it doesn’t work,” Reid said. Every single feature on the page needs a different model, because then we would have to say.