Summary

• EU competition officials are asking publishers whether Google’s AI Search opt-out gives them meaningful control without damaging conventional search visibility.
• The questions feed into an existing antitrust investigation into Google’s use of publisher content within AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• UK rules already require stronger publisher controls, attribution, and engagement information, creating a parallel test of how AI search should treat online content.

European competition officials are testing whether Google’s new controls for publishers go far enough to separate conventional search from the use of their material in generative AI, adding another layer to an antitrust investigation that reaches into the economics of online publishing.

The European Commission has been asking publishers whether they intend to use Google’s AI Search opt-out and what would determine that decision. The questionnaire also seeks views on changes bringing AI Overviews and AI Mode more closely together inside Google Search, where generative answers increasingly sit alongside or ahead of conventional links.

At the centre of the exercise is a difficult commercial choice for publishers whose businesses still depend heavily on search referrals. Google’s proposed mechanism is intended to let them prevent content appearing in generative AI features without surrendering their underlying search visibility, separating two uses of the same material that have historically been tied together through crawling and indexing.

Google introduced additional controls for website owners in June as generative AI became a larger part of its search product. The company says AI Overviews now has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode more than one billion, making publisher controls part of mainstream information distribution rather than an argument about an experimental search feature.

The Commission’s questions feed into a formal antitrust investigation opened in December 2025 into Google’s use of online content for AI purposes. Regulators said they would examine whether publisher material was being used for AI Overviews and AI Mode without appropriate compensation, and whether publishers could refuse that use without losing access to Google Search.

Search control becomes a competition question

Although copyright disputes have dominated much of the argument over AI and published material, the Commission’s investigation is framed through competition law. Its concern extends beyond whether content can be used to whether a company with a powerful position in search can impose conditions that leave publishers with little practical room to refuse while remaining visible on the same platform.

Generative interfaces make that distinction more consequential because they alter the role of the search engine itself. Conventional search largely directs users towards third-party websites, whereas AI Overviews can synthesise information before a click occurs, potentially changing how much traffic reaches the publishers whose material helped construct the answer.

Google argues that its AI features create new forms of discovery and engagement, while publishers have repeatedly warned that a search product capable of answering more questions itself could weaken the referral model that has supported much of the open web. The disagreement therefore involves both content rights and the distribution economics surrounding them.

The Commission has separately intensified its scrutiny of Google under the Digital Markets Act, including enforcement around self-preferencing in Search and restrictions affecting app developers. Those cases address different conduct, although they illustrate how Brussels is using several regulatory routes to examine the power attached to Google’s position between businesses and their customers.

An AI opt-out could ease one part of that tension if publishers can use it without losing meaningful conventional search visibility. However, a control that exists technically but becomes commercially impractical because it suppresses discovery, provides inadequate attribution, or leaves publishers unable to understand how their material is being used may not resolve the underlying imbalance.

Britain has already imposed publisher controls

The UK Competition and Markets Authority moved further in June by imposing a publisher conduct requirement on Google under Britain’s digital markets competition regime. The measures require effective controls over the use of publisher content in generative AI, clearer information about that use, engagement metrics, and steps intended to ensure publisher material is clearly attributed.

That intervention followed Google’s designation as having strategic market status in general search and search advertising. The designation does not itself establish wrongdoing, but it allows the CMA to set targeted conduct requirements rather than relying solely on a competition case after alleged harm has occurred.

London and Brussels are consequently reaching similar practical questions through different legal machinery. In both jurisdictions, publishers want to know whether ordinary search indexing can be separated from generative AI use while retaining visibility, useful data, attribution, and a realistic ability to refuse.

The issue becomes harder as search products themselves converge with AI assistants. A crawler may retrieve the same page for several downstream functions, while the boundary between a conventional result, an AI-generated summary, and an interactive answer can become less obvious to the person making the query.

Google therefore has to accommodate regulatory pressure without fragmenting a search product it is increasingly building around generative AI. Publishers, meanwhile, must decide whether withholding material from AI features protects their work or simply removes it from a growing part of online discovery.

The Commission has not announced an outcome from the questionnaire, and the wider antitrust investigation has no fixed deadline. The publisher responses will nevertheless give Brussels direct evidence of whether Google’s proposed separation between search and AI use functions commercially as well as technically — a distinction likely to shape the next stage of Europe’s scrutiny of AI-powered distribution.