Publishers will be able to opt out of AI Search, thanks to new regulation
The U.K. has implemented new regulations requiring Google to allow publishers to opt out of being included in AI search features. This move aims to give publishers more control over their content and improve their negotiating power with Google. The opt-out option will initially be tested with a subset of U.K. publishers before a global rollout.
- ▪Google must offer publishers a way to opt out of being aggregated into AI search.
- ▪Publishers can use a new toggle in Google’s Search Console to manage their participation.
- ▪The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority calls this regulation a 'world first'.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/publishers-will-be-able-to-opt-out-of-ai-search-thanks-to-new-regulation/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:58:33 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T15:02:09.825Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T15:59:46.308Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 1cg2qZpcxvfY |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The U.K. has just imposed legal guardrails on Google’s AI search onslaught. On Wednesday, Google announced compliance with the U.K.’s regulatory requirements, which state that the tech giant must offer publishers a way to opt out of being aggregated into AI search. To opt out, publishers will be able to use a new toggle in Google’s Search Console, a free service that allows website owners to manage their web presence in Google’s search results. Once opted out, the publisher’s site will not be shown in Google’s generative AI Search features, like AI Overviews, AI Mode, or AI Overviews in Discover.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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