Google’s global AI opt-out leaves publishers waiting for click data

Google opened a publisher opt-out from its AI search features worldwide on August 31, while U.K. publishers face a December 3 deadline for the click data they need to judge it.

The Search Console control follows the Competition and Markets Authority’s first conduct requirement on Google. The CMA imposed that requirement over the summer, and the ruling applied only to the U.K.; Google nevertheless opened the control worldwide on August 31. Publishers can use it to exclude their content from Google’s AI features. Google must deliver page-level grounding controls by March 3, 2027.

The immediate choice is blunt: publishers can stay in or leave Google’s AI package. They cannot remove one feature while retaining others. That trade-off now sits against a search product that adds more routes to publisher sites.

What will the missing click data show?

Google has shared impression data with regulators and publishers, showing how often their content appears in AI features. It has withheld clicks, which would show whether those appearances produce visits. Publishers hope Google will extend click data globally; the company has not confirmed that.

“That is the metric that will determine whether they [publishers] turn it off or not,” said Chris Dicker, CEO of Candr Media, which owns Trusted Reviews. Dicker said Google could have released clicks alongside impressions but did not.

He also said publishers are holding off because they fear losing a large share of their activity. He expects data in the coming weeks, ahead of Black Friday, when sites are unlikely to experiment during a crucial sales period.

Why is Google making AI links more prominent?

Google has updated AI Mode and AI Overviews to show links more often and more prominently. The company has added timely article carousels, related-story links and more context around surfaced articles. Google says these changes help publishers track, control and increase visibility.

Google is also testing links from video creators’ and publishers’ names to their Search profiles. Its Preferred Sources feature, which lets users pick and bookmark websites and publishers they trust, has grown sevenfold this year.

Those moves complicate the choice. The more useful Google’s AI surfaces become, the less attractive exclusion may look, particularly without evidence that AI answers send enough traffic back to offset lost control.

At Digiday’s Media Strategies London event in October, Carly Steven, the Daily Mail’s director of ecommerce and commercial editorial, said the paper was discussing how to use the CMA controls.

She said the group had to be careful because URL-level removal was arriving just as Google added another prominent feature. In her view, publishers still need to be present where users are, making the decision complicated.

David Buttle, founder of publisher AI standards coalition SPUR, sees Google’s preferred bargain as a value exchange: deliver enough referral traffic from AI surfaces for publishers to agree voluntarily, rather than pay for every use. He said Google needs to keep supplying that traffic. By contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT generally neither pays for content nor sends traffic out.

Buttle said Google is also trying to intermediate clicks from Discover, a major publisher traffic source, by serving summaries aggressively and tying that control to summaries elsewhere. Publishers will probably keep AI features unless Google lets them choose individual features, he said. Google could also change the Discover interface to extract more AI-mediated referrals, making exclusion harder.

Could opting out erase broader visibility?

Some publishers expect excluded sites to drop out of the Top Stories carousel Google places inside AI Overviews. Google has not said how the control treats that unit.

At The Economist Group, Josh Muncke, vice president of generative AI, said the company was looking at the controls but had not tested them. He said two measures will guide the decision: traffic from Google and how often The Economist’s name appears at the top of AI results, even when nobody clicks. He called that visibility second-order beyond traffic.

Muncke does not expect one permanent in-or-out choice. He described a process of testing, measuring and making data-driven calls over time. Reuters Digital’s Phil Andraos made a similar point in June: without click data, any decision could be slow and require testing.

The Professional Publishers Association is pressing the CMA to unbundle the controls so publishers can opt out of individual features rather than face only site- and page-level choices.

Eilidh Wilson, the PPA’s head of policy and public affairs, said: “You’re either opting out of search AI Mode, AI Overviews — basically all these different features — or none of them.” The group has agreed to give the CMA a further briefing.

Wilson’s concern reflects a substitution: an AI Overview can take the place of a click a publisher might have received, while the same content may still have value in a broader conversational search.

For publishers, what does this change? They gain an exclusion switch, but not feature-level control, and they still lack the traffic evidence needed to make the opt-out decision.