Publishers in UK can opt out of Google AI search results

bbc.co.uk

10 points·todd-davies··6 comments

Strange decision. The AI overview won't disappear but the UK news publishers will disappear from it. People who use a news publisher usually open their websites, not Google. People who open Google to look for news mostly are fulfilled by the AI overview content, if it isn't, they always can check links below the AI overview.

My reaction too. It seems like a no win for publishers.

Publishers gain nothing out of their content being shown in that overview. It is pure nothing for them.

Well there is a click-through rate. It might not be very high but it's not literally zero.

Correct, the click through from AI Overview is better than nothing, but it's not typically (anywhere near as) high as it would have been if the website was shown in the results without AI Overview at all.

Furthermore, opting out of AI Overview means that _other_ websites will be used for its grounding. Those competing websites will be cited and receive some citation traffic instead. So there's really very little incentive to opt-out for most websites.

Disclosure, I recently wrote a detailed write-up of these issues here: https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

The problem is that people now often don’t read past the AI result.

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