Sorry, the headline might be a little misleading. You can’t turn off AI Overviews when you search (although a lot of people are going over to using DuckDuckGo to do just that). What you can do is exclude your website from being used to provide content for Google’s generative AI search features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, without being excluded from the regular, traditional search engine.
Why Are Google Doing This?
This is entirely down to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the UK Government forcing Google to comply with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) or face serious fines. This new exclusion option is one of the remedies the CMA are imposing on Google, with the threat of a fine up to 10% of their global annual turnover (currently that turnover is somewhere in excess of £300 billion).
Essentially, the CMA found in favour of publishers who were in a catch-22 position. Google was taking the content from the publishers’ websites and using it in their own AI summaries. Essentially, Google are giving the end user the publisher’s work, without sending any traffic to the publisher’s website, thereby robbing them of advertising revenue. The only way to avoid this was to exclude the website from Google’s index entirely, meaning that it would be excluded from search as well, robbing these sites of a considerable source of traffic.
This was considered to be Google making unfair use of their monopoly position and at odds with the law. It’s likely that Google knew this was coming because the tools to allow users in the UK to remove their websites from Google’s generative AI search features were rolled out incredibly quickly (along with a rudimentary report about your website’s visibility in those self-same generative AI features).
Is It A Good Idea?
Removing yourself from the generative AI search features is not something to take lightly. Unless your business model is based around advertising on your website (newspapers, etc), then it is probably going to be a bad idea to remove yourself. While AI Overviews don’t send much in the way of traffic to websites, mentions and citations can result in improved visibility for your brand and help abbreviate the user’s journey down the marketing funnel.
If you are a newspaper or some other content publisher, and AI Overviews are simply taking your content, repackaging it for the end user, and then robbing you of advertising revenue, only then is this feature likely to be of any use to you. And even then, you have to weigh whether the loss of visibility is worth it. Sadly, if Google can get the answers elsewhere for a generative AI result for any searches you would show up for, then the end user is probably still going to stop at that summary.
Of course, many people may choose to remove their websites from Google’s generative AI, purely because they don’t like AI, or they strongly object to their content being used without compensation.
Are There Any Alternatives?
Rather than removing your content entirely, is there any way to be fairly paid for it? Well, maybe. A few different approaches are being trialled by various groups. A number of British news outlets have decided to include a contract inside their robots.txt file, basically telling AI tools that they can’t use the content on the website without the publisher receiving a payment, along with a link to the payment terms. The upside of this is that it ignores the entire issue with the “is AI recycling content actually theft” question and relies on contract law that has been settled and has centuries of precedent.
Officially, if an AI tool ignores the instructions, the publisher could take the AI’s owner to a small claims court. However, this hasn’t been tested, and a lot of AI companies have deep pockets to fight such attempts at making them pay for what content they use. There are a couple of other attempts going on, essentially locking AI out with a technical or legal paywall. Again, this hasn’t been tested, and how effective it might be is difficult to say.
Anything Else?
The CMA are demanding more changes from Google. On the 17th of this month, Google were instructed that they have six months from that date to comply with fairness and transparency demands relating to the search results. These can be summarised in three points:
Transparent and Clear
Google have to be transparent about what objective criteria they use for ranking websites in the search results, and that they must apply these criteria fairly. This means that Google will be prohibited from favouring their own platforms in the search results, and that businesses should be able to understand why their website suddenly dropped in the search results.
It should be noted that Google’s search algorithm is not only one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world, it’s also incredibly complex. It is likely that Google are going to fight on the transparency demand, as keeping the algorithm secret does prevent spammers from taking advantage of its loopholes (well, it never has stopped them, but that’ll be Google’s argument).
Advance Warning of Changes
Any future changes to the search algorithm (such as the semi-regular Core and Spam Updates) must be advertised in advance and their scope clearly announced. This is to give businesses and publishers the chance to ensure they are not negatively affected by the update.
Dispute and Resolution Process
Google are being forced to set up a method for publishers and businesses in the UK to make complaints, request reviews of negative impacts, and challenge Google’s actions.
So, How Exactly Will This Work?
Exactly what shape these changes will take is yet to be seen, but we know that the CMA have given Google six months to comply, and the potential penalties that can be imposed are enough for even a tech giant to blanche at. This includes the 10% of global annual turnover fine for serious breaches, or rolling fines of 5% of daily turnover, and even disqualifying Google’s directors from serving (although how this would work with the international nature of the matter is up for debate).
