UK publishers can now opt out of appearing in Google’s AI search results—the AI Overviews that appear at the top of many searches—and the regulator that made it happen says the point is to give publishers leverage to negotiate payment for their content.

According to the BBC, the Competition and Markets Authority, the UK’s official competition regulator, announced on Wednesday that websites based in the country can choose not to appear in Google’s AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from those generative AI features. The CMA called it a “world-first requirement” that puts publishers “in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google.”

The timing matters. Many publishers have seen significant traffic drops since Google moved traditional links down the results page and replaced them with AI summaries at the top. The opt-out mechanism is both a way to control traffic from AI as well as a negotiating lever. If a publisher removes itself from Google’s free AI distribution, the CMA’s position is that the same publisher can then demand payment to be included in AI results on different terms.

Google controls more than 90% of the online search market in the UK, according to the CMA. For almost three decades, websites and publishers have relied on Google’s search results to drive users to their businesses. That dependency is what the CMA’s requirement is designed to disrupt—at least in the AI layer.

The BBC quotes the regulator’s chief executive, Sarah Cardell, saying the requirement would result in “fair treatment, greater transparency and meaningful choice for businesses and consumers.” The CMA also said Google must properly attribute publishers’ content which appears in AI search results, with clear links back to their sites.

Google has nine months to bring all the changes in, but the CMA says it wants to see “important parts” of the requirements implemented earlier. The CMA has extra powers over Google and other large tech companies designated as having an influential position in the digital market, and it says it will be monitoring developments in Google search with the ability to act further if needed.

In a blog published the same day, Google said it was testing the new opt-out features in the UK first before rolling them out globally. The company said it was engaging with regulators “to ensure website owners have the right tools as user preferences evolve.”

The broader context is a shift in how people find information online. Some users have moved from traditional search engines to AI chatbots that produce answers based on information scraped from existing websites, often without driving traffic back to the source. The CMA’s intervention is an attempt to give publishers a seat at the table in a search landscape that has changed substantially since the last set of regulatory frameworks were designed.

Whether nine months is long enough to change the economic relationship between publishers and AI search platforms depends on how seriously both sides take the negotiating position the CMA is trying to create.

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BBC News is closing BBC Trending, its 13-year-old investigative unit focused on social media and online disinformation, Deadline reported Monday. Four journalists are losing their jobs.

The timing is hard to ignore. Recently, BBC Trending published an investigation revealing how Facebook grifters were profiting from AI-generated Holocaust imagery. The team also recently examined the phenomenon of Down’s Syndrome deepfakes.

BBC Trending launched in 2013 as what the broadcaster called “the bureau on the internet.” The unit published investigations on the BBC News website and produced a regular radio show for BBC World Service. One former journalist described it as a team that “married artful and considered storytelling with meticulous investigative journalism.”

The closure is part of broader cuts at BBC World Service, which announced plans last year to eliminate 130 jobs to save around £6 million ($8.3 million) by the end of March. BBC News declined to comment on the decision.

BBC Trending was among the few units at a major broadcaster dedicated to tracking viral disinformation and platform manipulation. As AI-generated content floods social platforms, newsrooms are losing one of the few organizations that actually tracked it. Who will fill that gap? 

The cuts come as AI-generated images and deepfakes become harder to detect and easier to produce. Verification work is getting more difficult precisely as the teams doing it are being downsized.

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