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The Verge
21-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Google rejected giving publishers more choice to opt out of AI Search
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.' That's according to a newly disclosed internal document spotted by Bloomberg, which reveals that Google had discussed offering publishers more granular control over how website data would be used in AI Search features instead of the illusion of choice they eventually received. The document, written by Google Search executive Chetna Bindra, was released during the US antitrust trial into Google's online search monopoly. The access to its search engine data gives Google a huge advantage in AI development over rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI. But Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode can be detrimental to the websites they source from by reducing clickthroughs, incentivizing publishers to keep their content out of AI summaries and related features if given the choice. One of the suggestions in the documents that Google considered a 'hard red line' would enable publishers to prevent Google's AI models from referencing their data in real time, but not opt out of being used to train features like AI Overviews generally. Another option, labelled as 'likely unstable,' suggested that no additional controls should be added, and that publishers can opt out of being indexed on Search entirely, 'if not satisfied.' A court hearing on May 2nd revealed that publishers are facing that ultimatum. While Google introduced a way for publishers to opt out of AI training in 2023, Google DeepMind vice president Eli Collins said it doesn't apply to search-specific AI products like AI Overviews. 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. When AI Overviews rolled out last year, Google decided to 'silently update' the information about publisher controls with 'no public announcement,' according to the document. Guidance on how to word the update also suggests that Google intentionally made it harder for publishers to know what they were actually opting out of to avoid getting 'into the details of distinction' between training for Gemini, AI Overviews, and other AI models. 'Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully,' Bindra said in the document. Google says that this document was an early list of options it was considering as AI search was evolving, and doesn't reflect the decisions it ultimately made. 'Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them,' Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels said in a statement to The Verge. 'New search features like AI Overviews have led to more searches, which creates new opportunities for sites to be discovered. The wording that Google currently uses is more upfront, saying that publishers who flag their content not to be used for AI Overviews and AI Mode will also keep it out of ' all forms of search results.'
AU Financial Review
21-05-2025
- Business
- AU Financial Review
‘Bit damning': How Google decided to cut publishers out of AI search
While using website data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a 'hard red line' and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to 'silently update', with 'no public announcement' about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. 'Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully.'
Toronto Sun
20-05-2025
- Business
- Toronto Sun
Google decided against offering publishers options in AI search
Published May 20, 2025 • 5 minute read Signage at the the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024. Alphabet Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on October 24. Photographer David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Bloomberg RSS (Bloomberg) — While using web site data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet Inc. executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a 'hard red line' and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to 'silently update,' with 'no public announcement' about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. 'Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully.' Site owners that rely on traffic can't afford to skip listing on Google, which still holds more than 90% of the search market, making it a gateway to the modern web. Many have reluctantly let Google use their content to power search AI features, like AI Overviews, which provides AI-generated responses for some queries — despite the fact that the feature often eats into their traffic. By answering questions directly, AI Overviews obviates the need for users to click on links, depriving sites of opportunities to make money by showing ads and selling products. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The Google document displayed in court shows the company recognized from the beginning the possibility of giving publishers more control, said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. 'It's a little bit damning,' he said. 'It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them — the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all.' Google was recently on trial in Washington as a federal judge mulled what steps the tech giant must take to restore competition in online search. Judge Amit Mehta, who presided over the hearings, is now considering a set of remedies proposed by antitrust enforcers aimed at curbing Google's market dominance. The final day of testimony was May 9, with closing arguments set for later this month. A ruling on the proposed remedies is expected in August. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Among the options discussed in internal company slides, Google listed the possibility of 'SGE-only opt-outs' — which would have let publishers opt out of having their content used in some generative AI features in Google Search, without disappearing from the search engine itself. One item under discussion would have allowed publishers to 'choose to opt their content out of being displayed within' AI Overviews, though their data 'would still be used for training purposes.' Another, which Google presented as the most extreme, would have let publishers 'opt out of their data being used for grounding' — a process in which Google and other AI companies anchor their models in real-world sources, with the aim of preventing AI from making up information and making its responses more accurate. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Google ultimately chose to give publishers no new options. The presentation advised introducing 'no new controls BUT reposition publicly' to point publishers toward an existing opt-out called 'no snippet,' that allows publishers to be exempt from AI Overviews and other search features. Choosing this option also causes summaries of their website to disappear from the search page, making people unlikely to click on the link. 'Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them,' a Google spokesperson said in a statement in response to questions about the trial exhibit from Bloomberg. 'This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions.' They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In the year since AI Overviews launched, traffic to some publishers' sites has dropped precipitously. Even more significant to publishers in the long run is advancing the development of models that produce something good enough to replace their content, said Brooke Hartley Moy, chief executive officer of Infactory, an AI startup that works with publishers. 'If Google's models get to a point where the human element of content is diminished, then they've kind of signed their own death warrant,' Hartley Moy said of publishers. RECOMMENDED VIDEO As publishers search for new revenue streams, allowing their content to be used for retrieval augmented generation, or RAG — a technique in which AI models refer back to specific sources to provide more accurate responses — has emerged as a promising contender, Hartley Moy said. That's what makes Google's move to take RAG off the negotiating table so significant, she said. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'RAG doesn't exist without publishers,' Hartley Moy said. 'To me, this is a strategy in ensuring that Google has full market power, and the publishers lose one of their key chips in the negotiation.' Under questioning by Google lawyer Kenneth Smurzynski, Liz Reid, the company's head of search, testified that creating multiple opt-outs for different products and models would be challenging. 'That would mean if Search has multiple GenAI features on the page, which it can easily do, each of those would be required to have a separate model powering it. But we don't build separate models for those,' Reid said, according to court transcripts of the trial testimony on May 6. 'And so by saying a publisher could be like, 'I want to be in this feature but not that feature,' it doesn't work,' she continued. 'Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.' This would be very costly not only because of the significant investment in hardware and chips that it would require, Reid said, but also because it would be a challenge to ensure the different AI models operated efficiently and delivered fast responses. 'It adds enormous complexity,' she testified.
NDTV
20-05-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Google Decided Against Offering Publishers Options In AI Search
While using web site data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet Inc. executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a "hard red line" and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to "silently update," with "no public announcement" about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. "Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully." Google's dominance in search, which a federal court ruled last year is an illegal monopoly, has given it a decisive advantage in the ongoing AI wars. According to Google's rules - and previous trial testimony from a company vice-president of product - the tech giant may use the content that feeds into its search engine results to develop other search-related AI products. Publishers can only shield their data from search AI if they opt out of search altogether, Google has said. Site owners that rely on traffic can't afford to skip listing on Google, which still holds more than 90% of the search market, making it a gateway to the modern web. Many have reluctantly let Google use their content to power search AI features, like AI Overviews, which provides AI-generated responses for some queries - despite the fact that the feature often eats into their traffic. By answering questions directly, AI Overviews obviates the need for users to click on links, depriving sites of opportunities to make money by showing ads and selling products. The Google document displayed in court shows the company recognized from the beginning the possibility of giving publishers more control, said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. "It's a little bit damning," he said. "It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them - the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all." Google was recently on trial in Washington as a federal judge mulled what steps the tech giant must take to restore competition in online search. Judge Amit Mehta, who presided over the hearings, is now considering a set of remedies proposed by antitrust enforcers aimed at curbing Google's market dominance. The final day of testimony was May 9, with closing arguments set for later this month. A ruling on the proposed remedies is expected in August. One part of the Justice Department's proposal is compelling Google to give online publishers and creators a way to opt out of having the content of their web pages be used to train Google's generative AI models "on a model-by-model basis," as well as having an opt-out for individual generative AI products "on a product-by-product basis," without penalty. Among the options discussed in internal company slides, Google listed the possibility of "SGE-only opt-outs" - which would have let publishers opt out of having their content used in some generative AI features in Google Search, without disappearing from the search engine itself. One item under discussion would have allowed publishers to "choose to opt their content out of being displayed within" AI Overviews, though their data "would still be used for training purposes." Another, which Google presented as the most extreme, would have let publishers "opt out of their data being used for grounding" - a process in which Google and other AI companies anchor their models in real-world sources, with the aim of preventing AI from making up information and making its responses more accurate. Google ultimately chose to give publishers no new options. The presentation advised introducing "no new controls BUT reposition publicly" to point publishers toward an existing opt-out called "no snippet," that allows publishers to be exempt from AI Overviews and other search features. Choosing this option also causes summaries of their website to disappear from the search page, making people unlikely to click on the link. "Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them," a Google spokesperson said in a statement in response to questions about the trial exhibit from Bloomberg. "This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online. The document shown in court included recommendations for how company representatives might consider communicating the information, as well as what not to say explicitly. "If aligned, as a next step, we will work on actual language and get this out," Bindra's document, which was written in April 2024, concluded. One month later, at its annual developers conference in Mountain View, California, Google broadly infused search with AI, in what it called a "fully revamped" experience. In the year since AI Overviews launched, traffic to some publishers' sites has dropped precipitously. Even more significant to publishers in the long run is advancing the development of models that produce something good enough to replace their content, said Brooke Hartley Moy, chief executive officer of Infactory, an AI startup that works with publishers. "If Google's models get to a point where the human element of content is diminished, then they've kind of signed their own death warrant," Hartley Moy said of publishers. As publishers search for new revenue streams, allowing their content to be used for retrieval augmented generation, or RAG - a technique in which AI models refer back to specific sources to provide more accurate responses - has emerged as a promising contender, Hartley Moy said. That's what makes Google's move to take RAG off the negotiating table so significant, she said. "RAG doesn't exist without publishers," Hartley Moy said. "To me, this is a strategy in ensuring that Google has full market power, and the publishers lose one of their key chips in the negotiation." Under questioning by Google lawyer Kenneth Smurzynski, Liz Reid, the company's head of search, testified that creating multiple opt-outs for different products and models would be challenging. "That would mean if Search has multiple GenAI features on the page, which it can easily do, each of those would be required to have a separate model powering it. But we don't build separate models for those," Reid said, according to court transcripts of the trial testimony on May 6. "And so by saying a publisher could be like, 'I want to be in this feature but not that feature,' it doesn't work," she continued. "Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model." This would be very costly not only because of the significant investment in hardware and chips that it would require, Reid said, but also because it would be a challenge to ensure the different AI models operated efficiently and delivered fast responses. "It adds enormous complexity," she testified.
Mint
19-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Google Decided Against Offering Publishers Options in AI Search
(Bloomberg) -- While using web site data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet Inc. executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a 'hard red line' and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to 'silently update,' with 'no public announcement' about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. 'Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully.' Site owners that rely on traffic can't afford to skip listing on Google, which still holds more than 90% of the search market, making it a gateway to the modern web. Many have reluctantly let Google use their content to power search AI features, like AI Overviews, which provides AI-generated responses for some queries — despite the fact that the feature often eats into their traffic. By answering questions directly, AI Overviews obviates the need for users to click on links, depriving sites of opportunities to make money by showing ads and selling products. The Google document displayed in court shows the company recognized from the beginning the possibility of giving publishers more control, said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. 'It's a little bit damning,' he said. 'It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them — the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all.' Google was recently on trial in Washington as a federal judge mulled what steps the tech giant must take to restore competition in online search. Judge Amit Mehta, who presided over the hearings, is now considering a set of remedies proposed by antitrust enforcers aimed at curbing Google's market dominance. The final day of testimony was May 9, with closing arguments set for later this month. A ruling on the proposed remedies is expected in August. Among the options discussed in internal company slides, Google listed the possibility of 'SGE-only opt-outs' — which would have let publishers opt out of having their content used in some generative AI features in Google Search, without disappearing from the search engine itself. One item under discussion would have allowed publishers to 'choose to opt their content out of being displayed within' AI Overviews, though their data 'would still be used for training purposes.' Another, which Google presented as the most extreme, would have let publishers 'opt out of their data being used for grounding' — a process in which Google and other AI companies anchor their models in real-world sources, with the aim of preventing AI from making up information and making its responses more accurate. Google ultimately chose to give publishers no new options. The presentation advised introducing 'no new controls BUT reposition publicly' to point publishers toward an existing opt-out called 'no snippet,' that allows publishers to be exempt from AI Overviews and other search features. Choosing this option also causes summaries of their website to disappear from the search page, making people unlikely to click on the link. 'Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them,' a Google spokesperson said in a statement in response to questions about the trial exhibit from Bloomberg. 'This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions.' They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online. In the year since AI Overviews launched, traffic to some publishers' sites has dropped precipitously. Even more significant to publishers in the long run is advancing the development of models that produce something good enough to replace their content, said Brooke Hartley Moy, chief executive officer of Infactory, an AI startup that works with publishers. 'If Google's models get to a point where the human element of content is diminished, then they've kind of signed their own death warrant,' Hartley Moy said of publishers. As publishers search for new revenue streams, allowing their content to be used for retrieval augmented generation, or RAG — a technique in which AI models refer back to specific sources to provide more accurate responses — has emerged as a promising contender, Hartley Moy said. That's what makes Google's move to take RAG off the negotiating table so significant, she said. 'RAG doesn't exist without publishers,' Hartley Moy said. 'To me, this is a strategy in ensuring that Google has full market power, and the publishers lose one of their key chips in the negotiation.' Under questioning by Google lawyer Kenneth Smurzynski, Liz Reid, the company's head of search, testified that creating multiple opt-outs for different products and models would be challenging. 'That would mean if Search has multiple GenAI features on the page, which it can easily do, each of those would be required to have a separate model powering it. But we don't build separate models for those,' Reid said, according to court transcripts of the trial testimony on May 6. 'And so by saying a publisher could be like, 'I want to be in this feature but not that feature,' it doesn't work,' she continued. 'Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.' This would be very costly not only because of the significant investment in hardware and chips that it would require, Reid said, but also because it would be a challenge to ensure the different AI models operated efficiently and delivered fast responses. 'It adds enormous complexity,' she testified. (Updates with further Google comment in the 11th paragraph.) More stories like this are available on
