News organisations hope proposals will increase leverage to get paid if content is used in AI summaries
Web publishers and news organisations could be given the power to stop Google scraping their content for its AI Overviews, under measures announced by the UK competition watchdog to loosen its grip on online search.
Media organisations have experienced a drop in click-through traffic to their websites – and therefore their revenue – since Google started posting AI summaries at the top of search results, which many people read without clicking through to the original journalism.
Sites have been unable to opt out of their content being scraped for those overviews without also withdrawing from traditional Google search, which, given the company’s market dominance, would hugely affect the visibility of their journalism.
On Wednesday, the Competition and Markets Authority proposed “a fairer deal” over how their content was used and launched a month-long consultation on allowing publishers to “be able to opt out of their content being used to power AI features such as AI Overviews or to train AI models outside of Google search”.
