CMA says UK media groups should be allowed to opt out of Google AI overviews

Web publishers and news organizations could be given the power to stop Google from scraping their content for its AI digests under measures announced by Britain’s competition watchdog to loosen their control over online search.

Since Google began publishing AI summaries at the top of search results that many people read without clicking through to the original journalism, media organizations have seen a decline in click-through traffic to their websites and therefore their revenue.

The sites could not opt ​​out of having their content scraped for these roundups without simultaneously withdrawing from traditional Google search, which would have a huge impact on the visibility of their journalism given the company’s market dominance.

On Wednesday, the Competition and Markets Authority proposed “a fairer deal” for the use of their content, launching a month-long consultation to allow publishers to “deny the use of their content for AI functions such as AI…”