Publishers in UK can opt out of Google AI search results
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced that online publishers can opt out of appearing in Google's AI search results. This decision aims to enhance publishers' negotiating power regarding content deals with Google, which has been criticized for reducing traffic to their sites. The CMA also requires Google to properly attribute publishers' content in its AI results, promoting fair treatment and transparency.
- ▪Publishers in the UK can choose to opt out of Google's AI search results.
- ▪The CMA believes this will strengthen publishers' negotiating power with Google.
- ▪Google must attribute publishers' content in its AI search results with clear links.
5 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 8 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Google Is Testing an Option for Websites to Opt Out of AI Search — CNET
- ▪ Google tests option to allow sites to opt out of appearing in AI search results — Google
- ▪ Google will allow websites to exclude themselves from AI search results — Engadget
- ▪ Google will let websites opt-out of AI Mode & Overviews in Search — 9to5Google
BBC News — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 49 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | BBC News — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c775pp26yz5o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:12:20 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T05:16:55.971Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T05:16:55.971Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | gBZm9mG46XcK · 5 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Publishers in UK can opt out of Google AI search resultsJust nowShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleImran Rahman-JonesTechnology reporterGetty ImagesOnline publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews of Google search results in the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced.The competition regulator said this would "put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google".Many websites have complained that they have seen a large drop in traffic since Google started placing AI summaries at the top of its search results page.The CMA also said Google must properly attribute publishers' content which appears in its AI search results, with clear links to their sites."It is crucial that content publishers, including…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at BBC News — Tech.
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