AI Overviews Are Harming Competition, Letting Publishers Opt-out Won’t Help

The online search market has been remarkably stable for the past two decades, dominated by Google and its ten blue links. That equilibrium, however, looks increasingly unstable. Advances in large language models have produced AI assistants, like ChatGPT, which can return information in accessible prose, generate images, and even converse with users, a new paradigm which threatens Google’s longstanding dominance in search.

In response, Google launched its AI Overviews feature in 2024, a feature which summarises the content of the webpages returned in the Google Search results. These formatted summaries with images and citations are typically placed above Google’s search results. Publishers were quick to notice, as traffic to their websites dropped precipitously. Users, it appeared, were able to get the information that they wanted directly on the Google Search page rather than having to click through to the websites in the search results. This effect has been coined ’Google Zero’: the point at which referral traffic from the search giant dwindles to nothing.

Competition authorities have taken notice, focusing on the fact that Google does not let publishers refuse the use of their content in Google’s AI Overviews without also opting out of appearing in its search engine entirely. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has proposed commitments under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act which would allow publishers “to opt out of their content being used to power AI features such as AI Overviews or to train AI models outside of Google search”. The European Commission has, meanwhile, opened an investigation into Google for using publishers’ content “without appropriate compensation to publishers and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content”.

In a recent paper, Spencer Cohen and I argue that an opt-out remedy - an intervention which seeks to allow publishers to opt-out of their content appearing in AI Overviews, while remaining in Google’s search results - would not address the competition concerns arising from AI Overviews. Furthermore, we argue that an opt-out remedy also may have several significant unintended consequences.

An opt-out remedy would be ineffective

There are two reasons why an opt-out remedy would be ineffective. First, it would not prevent the harm to competition caused by AI Overviews. As established in Google Shopping[AR1] , third-party undertakings compete for traffic on Google Search. We argue that the main harm to competition caused by AI Overviews does not relate to the uncompensated use of publishers’ content, but rather the hoarding of traffic on Google’s own website. Publishers cannot compete on the merits against AI Overviews for user traffic because their content is shown in a less attractive manner. Allowing publishers to individually opt-out of appearing in AI Overviews would not prevent Google from showing AI Overviews, and therefore not prevent Google from starving publishers of traffic.

Second, in the status quo, publishers face a Hobson’s choice between opting in or out of AI Overviews; neither is a good option. Accordingly, a second aim of the opt-out remedy is to give “businesses and consumers more choice and control over how they interact with Google’s search services”. It would fail to do so. Publishers would gain little by opting out of their content appearing in AI Overviews because doing so would not result in them regaining traffic. Furthermore, opting out would put publishers at a competitive disadvantage against their peers who have opted in, since those peers would be cited in the AI Overviews who would receive additional traffic through citations. To make matters worse, the choice architecture created by the opt-out remedy would make opting in the default option, and would give Google latitude to use dark patterns to prevent publishers from opting out, as highlighted by Singh and Scott-Morton.

An opt-out remedy would create new risks

A remedy which allows publishers to opt-out of AI Overviews would also come with its own risks. First, publishers opting out could lead to lower quality summaries for users. Second, it could lead to the misattribution of content if one publisher has opted out, yet its content has been syndicated by another which has opted in. Third, absent a compensation mechanism, the remedy would legitimise Google’s ability to free ride on the work invested by publishers into creating content in the first place. Fourth, an opt-out remedy creates the potential for political bias in AI Overviews, in the case that there are systematic asymmetries in the political leanings of publishers which opt-in and opt-out. Fifth, the remedy risks harming democracy by undermining the business models of small independent publishers who provide a public good of educational information, and by reducing the autonomy of consumers to choose which websites to surf on the internet.

Conclusion

What should competition authorities do instead? We suggest two ways forward.

First, competition regulators might look to help facilitate a broader approach which can create a new, sustainable business model for publishers’ content. Such an approach could entail Google paying publishers a license fee in exchange for using their content in its AI Overviews. Such an approach, however, suffers from its own drawbacks, including that it may make publishers structurally dependent on Google for funding, or that previous attempts to mandate a license fee have failed on account of an imbalance of bargaining power between Google and publishers, and because publishers would still not receive traffic from Google.

Second, that competition authorities should seriously consider whether AI Overview, in its current form, is compatible with the concept of merit-based competition at all, given that it is prominently and attractively placed above the websites from which its content is sourced. In rapidly changing markets, Article 102 TFEU “requires action [as quickly as possible] before the anti-competitive effects of that strategy are realised”. As publishers are keen to emphasise, Google’s AI Overview is having significant and adverse effects on their business models. As such, an interim measure to curtail the use of AI Overviews should be considered in order to protect the effective, merit-based structure of competition for internet traffic. Doing so would safeguard the business models of publishers from the effects of Google’s conduct before they are unduly harmed, or even disappear altogether. Since these publishers are critical to the open web, such an intervention may be necessary to protect the internet as we know it.