• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 6, 2025

Google is being pressured by a group of independent publishers in the U.K. to stop “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search."

The Independent Publishers Alliance filed an antitrust complaint dated June 30 with the European Commission alleging that Google abuses its market power in online search. 

Google has made big bets in generative AI by integrating the technology into AI Overviews and its search engine, but the move has angered many publishers and prompted a group to file an antitrust complaint that argues the move causes significant harm to all types of publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.

AI Overviews are summaries generated that appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries. Google began adding advertisements to AI Overviews last May.

Publishers have become angered that they do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested into Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page, the complaint explains. The news was first reported by Press Gazette and Reuters.

Google believes AI features in search create opportunities for businesses. “Google says it doesn’t roll out AI Overviews on ‘news,’” Dominic Ponsford, editor in chief at Press Gazette, wrote in post on LinkedIn.

“But when Press Gazette published an exclusive news story about a recent snafu at the Telegraph over the tale of a banker struggling with the cost of school fees,” which turned out to be largely fictitious, the Google AI summary generated a a 250 word story that ran in search, he explains.

He spurred on the UK Competition and Markets Authority to take action on tech platforms for their overreach. If they don’t, he wrote, “we might as well rename Britain the United Fiefdom of Alphabet and Meta.”

Google had considered a way to allow publishers to opt-out of content being surfaced in AI Overviews back in April 2024, a year ahead of the rollout.

Press Gazette explained that one option would have been—no changes to how publishers could opt out or limit the display of their content in search. The other option would have been to use something referred to as “hard red line,” meaning that publishers could choose to opt out of their data being used for grounding.”

The content would not be used for any retrieval augmented generation [RAG], a process that allows GAI models to retrieve and reference new information from the web in real-time.

A May 2025 article explained how publishers could opt out from allowing AI chatbot Gemini and AI development platform Vertex from scraping their content through something called Google-Extended, but it does not stop sites from being accessed and used in Google’s AI Overviews summaries.

To avoid scraping, at the time, publishers would have had to opt out of being scraped by Googlebot, which indexes for search. Of course, processes have changed significantly since then.

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