google Archives - The Media Copilot https://mediacopilot.ai/tag/google/ How AI is changing Media, journalism and content creation Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:16:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://mediacopilot.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/cropped-cropped-Media-Copilot-favicon-60x60.jpeg google Archives - The Media Copilot https://mediacopilot.ai/tag/google/ 32 32 German court rules Google is liable for false answers in AI Overviews https://mediacopilot.ai/german-court-google-ai-overviews-liable/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:30:37 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=8341 A German court says Google is on the hook when its AI Overviews wrong.

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A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI-generated search overviews say, in a decision that legal observers say could ripple far beyond Germany. As The Decoder reported, the Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring it from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI Overviews.

At the center of the ruling is a distinction the court drew sharply: AI Overviews are not search results. They are Google’s own content.

According to the court, Google’s AI Overviews had falsely tied the two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. The AI mixed up information about genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that appeared in none of the linked sources. The publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter; Google didn’t respond appropriately, the court found.

The judges classified Google as a direct infringer because the overview “rewrites and judges results in its own words and according to its own structure.” In the case at hand, the AI opened with confident assertions like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then assembled its own summary, red flags, and user tips. Because Google built the AI, offered it, and controls its algorithms, the court ruled, Google owns what it produces.

Crucially, the court found that existing case law shielding search engines doesn’t apply. Germany’s Federal Court of Justice had previously granted traditional search engines limited liability because they merely point to outside websites. But AI Overviews generate “independent, new, and substantive statements,” the Munich court said, and only Google is positioned to check them against the underlying sources.

Google’s defense—that users can check the linked sources themselves and generally know not to blindly trust AI—fell flat. The court ruled that the ability to disprove a statement through further research doesn’t exempt a publisher from liability, drawing a parallel to press law, where outlets are liable for standalone teasers even if readers never click through. The reasoning is bolstered by research showing users almost never click source links in AI Overviews.

The court also weakened free speech protections for AI output, writing that an AI’s opinion is “not the expression of an acquired conviction” but “the result of an algorithm” and largely an expression of Google’s business interests.

Google was ordered to cover 80% of the legal costs, with the plaintiffs paying 10 percent each. The court said the ruling may have international reach.

The decision lands as scrutiny of AI accuracy intensifies. An analysis by AI startup Oumi for The New York Times found Google’s AI Overviews, running the current Gemini 3 model, answered correctly 91% of the time. At Google’s scale, that still means millions of wrong answers every hour—and a legal exposure that could extend to rivals like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

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UK publishers can now opt out of Google AI Overveiws https://mediacopilot.ai/uk-publishers-opt-out-google-ai-search-cma/ Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:31:50 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=8207 Google UK opt-out off switchThe CMA says the opt-out mechanism is designed to give publishers negotiating power, not just traffic control.

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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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The click is dying but the citation just got more valuable https://mediacopilot.ai/the-click-is-dying-but-the-citation-just-got-more-valuable/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=8128 Editorial illustration showing newspaper clippings being pulled into an AI search answer panel with a sponsored ad tagGoogle's new AI ad formats could weaken publisher traffic further. But advertisers need credible answers, and that gives media new leverage.

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Google is not a company anyone expected to root for in the AI era. The early Bard demos were rough, Perplexity and ChatGPT were peeling away curious users, and antitrust regulators were closing in. The narrative a year ago was that the search giant had finally been outmaneuvered.

Now that looks dead wrong. Google is in a much stronger position today. Not because of it’s just coming off a prolific I/O developer conference, and not because it suddenly has the best model or the most capable AI ecosystem. Those titles get passed around the big labs every few months in any case. The reason is simpler: the money is still coming in.

The business is adapting

The Q1 numbers tell the story. Alphabet’s Google Services revenue was up 16% to $89.6 billion. Google Search and “Other” revenue was up 19%. The data is a strong indicator that the supposed AI disruption to its search products hasn’t dented the ad machine. If anything, it has fed it.

That confidence showed at I/O. Google announced many new AI products, but one of the most notable ones to the media industry was a set of new ad formats. Conversational Discovery ads are built on the fly to fit naturally into the answer to the person’s query, appearing as a “sponsored” section. Highlighted Ads and AI-powered Shopping Ads work similarly inside general product category queries. And then there are Business Agents for Leads, tailored versions of Gemini that live inside the ad itself.

These formats are still in testing, but the direction is obvious. Google is getting more sophisticated about how it monetizes AI experiences. A few months ago, the company stated it had no plans to sell ads in Gemini, a line executives floated in response to ChatGPT ads. Technically that line is still operative; Google can still say that the Gemini chatbot is not becoming an ad product. But that distinction feels less meaningful now that so many Gemini-powered AI experiences across Search are being commercialized.

Here is the part publishers should sit with. All those AI-powered ads appear within or next to an answer. That answer is built, in large part, from the work of media publishers. In the old system, Google sold ads next to results, and those ads benefitted from the close proximity to links from trusted media sources. Search the best SUVs and you may see ads for Toyota or Hyundai before you see a link to Car and Driver.

Now the information, built in part from the publisher’s content, is right there on the result. The user gets the info, the AI-powered ad provides a path to transact, and everything is handled without any need for them to ever leave Google. The shift is fundamental. Instead of monetizing the path to information, Google is now monetizing the information experience itself.

Publishers, of course, get cut out of that bargain. In many cases, their content was the raw material that informed the answer. Early in the AI search era, Google’s pitch to publishers was that AI-referred traffic was higher quality, more likely to engage and transact. That was, broadly, true. But why would users engage on a publisher site when Google is providing the means to do that before they ever arrive? The new ad formats are an acceleration of a trend that was already bad for publishers.

Trust is the variable everyone is missing

And yet. Users don’t care about business models. Whether they have an inclination to buy something or engage depends not just on the content of the answer but on how much they trust it. That is where the calculus gets interesting for publishers. A study published in Nature described trust in AI as dynamic and context-dependent. In other words, it changes depending on the nature of the AI experience and over time. A separate study by the Reuters Institute found users had moderate trust in AI answers, but they also value their speed and aggregation. Translation. Utility is high. Trust is conditional.

One of the most important assets any media brand has is the trust it cultivates over time. Imagine two AI answers about the same product. One built from social posts, blogs, Reddit threads, and online forums. The other built from articles on Consumer Reports, the Wirecutter, Time, and CNET. The user doesn’t need to know the methodology to feel the difference. Which one sounds more trustworthy?

Citations, in other words, are not decoration. People will be more inclined to trust answers created from brands that they’re familiar with. Hard data on AI ad performance is thin, but the entire media ad model is founded on this idea. An ad doesn’t just benefit from being present on a platform. It benefits from being associated with that platform’s brand. Ads inherit context. They always have.

Google has not, to date, been especially responsive to what publishers want. But Google does need advertisers to believe AI search ads work. That need is the leverage. If advertisers see better performance when ads appear beside credible, well-sourced answers, they will care about the quality of those answers. Once advertisers care, Google has to care. That could create pressure on Google to maintain a healthier source ecosystem.

What that pressure looks like is the open question. It may not look like simple licensing deals. It could involve clearer traffic paths, richer citation treatment, new publisher products, commercial partnerships, or advertiser demand for premium source environments inside AI search results. Each of those is a different commercial conversation publishers should be having now, not later.

The click fades but the value doesn’t

Review sites are the clearest example because the transaction path is obvious. If someone asks for the best dishwasher, the AI answer can cite reviews and then push the user toward purchase. But the same logic extends well past commerce. A health answer, a travel plan, or even a summary of a political issue all depend on source trust. Even when there’s no immediate checkout, the user’s confidence in the answer shapes what they believe and what they do next.

For publishers, the warning is straightforward. Google’s new push into AI ad experiences could further weaken traditional publisher revenue streams, especially traffic-based display, affiliate, and search-driven monetization. For practitioners trying to think a step ahead, there is another side to the equation. If AI answers need credibility to be useful, then credible media still has value. That value will not always show up on a referral chart. But it will still shape whether users trust the answer enough to act on it.

A version of this column appears in Fast Company.

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The end of 10 blue links is not the end of Google https://mediacopilot.ai/end-of-10-blue-links-not-end-of-google/ Thu, 21 May 2026 12:56:15 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=7610 Google’s AI search push may kill the old web traffic model, but it shows how firmly the company still controls the future of information.

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For a while, it seemed like Google Search was in trouble.

Seemingly caught by surprise by the AI revolution that ChatGPT sparked, Google looked old and confused as upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity pointed to a new future that replaced the “10 blue links” with question-and-answer conversations. Google’s first steps into this future were unsteady, with error-filled answers epitomized by the infamous glue-on-pizza moment. Some suspected, for all its scale and influence, a post-Google world was near.

That looks a lot less likely after this week. At Google I/O, the company confidently showed us its version of our informational future. And while it might be post-search, it’s not at all post-Google. Google is expanding its use of AI Overviews, meaning more searches will include the top-of-page summaries, and it’s adding a query box within them. When a user engages with it, they’re kicked to AI Mode, which abandons the “10 blue links” altogether.

In addition, oogle.com now has a “+” icon, similar to its Gemini chatbot. If user engages with it and uploads a file or photo, that will also take them to AI Mode. It’s now extremely difficult to search on a Google product without AI being part of the result. You can still find your page of links by switching to “Web,” though that option is often buried.

So, far from the future where search is competitive again, it’s increasingly looking like a new future that’s the same as the old future. Even if you look just at AI chatbots, the Gemini app is now at 900 million users, making it about as big as ChatGPT. That doesn’t even count AI Overviews and AI Mode, which have 2.5 billion and 1 billion users, respectively, according to the company.

The bots ARE the traffic

The obvious consequence of all this is more searches will begin and end in the query. For publishers, that continues and likely accelerates the ongoing traffic apocalypse. We may, however, have to update our vocabulary: Google Zero—which was supposed to connote an environment where the clicks from Google search were basically nil—feels imprecise.

That goes double when you consider that, as humans spend more time in AI interfaces, a commensurate amount of bot activity spreads out from those queries. So the future isn’t Google Zero. It’s Google Bot Infinity.

So the future is a world where people happily chat—either via typing or speech—to Google, and those Google bots bring the right information and context to answer them. More accurately, those bots bring what they deem as the right information and context to queries. AI systems prioritize information differently from traditional search, looking for information that both fits a pattern but also includes novel and authoritative elements. This is manifesting into the new-but-rapidly-evolving field of GEO, or generative engine optimization. Google’s renewed push into AI experiences means the battle for presence in answers is no longer a side bet. It’s the game.

That’s the media story here in Google’s renewed rise. Once laughed at for how far behind it was in the AI race, it’s now architecting the future where it’s still in charge. Judging by its balance sheet—with earnings steadily increasing even as competitors rise—it’s found the right balance of building the new while preserving the old. Even as it demotes the “10 blue links” that built the company, it’s offering a bevy of new ad products in conversational search that spin up generative ads on the fly. It clearly has the confidence that it can make money in an AI world.

Brands might be less confident about that, and publishers even more so. Authority in AI answers is nice, but monetizing has so far been a challenge.

Credibility is the new click

But it’s not nothing. If Google’s AI layer becomes the place where people encounter information, then presence inside that layer becomes a form of distribution. A publisher cited consistently in answers about politics, technology, health, finance, or culture has something valuable: proof that it owns authority in a category. The old metric was how many people Google sent to you. The new one may be how often Google needs you to make its answers credible.

That may not produce the same clean, scalable ad business that search referrals once did. But it points to a different one. Advertisers have always wanted to sit next to authority. They sponsored sections, bought podcast reads, backed newsletters, underwrote events, and cut direct deals with creators because association matters. If a publisher becomes one of the sources AI systems repeatedly rely on, that authority can be sold directly—not necessarily through Google, and not necessarily as a banner ad awkwardly stapled to a webpage.

That’s the hopeful version of Google Bot Infinity. Publishers may lose a lot of casual traffic, and pretending otherwise is foolish. But the ones that produce distinctive, trusted, deeply useful work still have leverage. The job now is to make that work legible to machines without making it lifeless for people.

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Google declares the end of the ’10 blue links’ era with AI search overhaul https://mediacopilot.ai/google-declares-end-ten-blue-links-ai-search-overhaul/ Wed, 20 May 2026 16:04:42 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=7537 Google I/O unveiled the biggest change to Search in 25 years — and it starts this week.

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The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

Google unveiled a sweeping AI-powered overhaul of Search at its I/O conference Tuesday, TechCrunch reported, centered on what the company calls the biggest change to the search box in more than 25 years. Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences, starting this week.

The reimagined search box expands to accommodate longer, conversational queries without forcing users to pick a search mode at the start. A new AI-powered query suggestion system moves beyond autocomplete, helping users craft more complex queries. AI Overviews now allow follow-up questions in AI Mode, which launched last year and already has more than 1 billion monthly users.

The rise of information agents

Perhaps the most consequential change: users will be able to create, customize, and manage multiple “information agents” within Google Search starting this summer. These agents work in the background 24/7, tracking changes on the web and alerting users when conditions are met, pulling from real-time data and delivering synthesized updates.

It’s an evolution of Google Alerts, the change-detection service Google launched in 2003. “You could send an alert to track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters, and the agent will map out a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and the data it needs to access,” said Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search. “And it will then keep track of those changes and let you know when the conditions are met, and provide a synthesized update with links and information you can dive into further.”

The shift means “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. People will spend less time clicking links and more time acting on synthesized information. It’s a shift our coverage of the answer engine era has been tracking closely.

Generative UI and mini apps

Google is also introducing “generative UI”—building custom widgets and visualizations on the fly in response to users’ search questions. A query about black holes could generate an interactive visual that users can then ask follow-up questions about, with Google responding with brand-new visuals in real time. Search results will increasingly look like interactive web pages.

The system, built in partnership with Google DeepMind using Gemini Flash 3.5, will also let users tap into Google’s Antigravity platform to build personalized mini apps directly in Search using natural-language commands, such as meal-planning apps that factor in your calendar, fitness apps tailored to your goals.

AI Overviews now has more than 2.5 billion monthly users. Conversational search (AI Mode) tops 1 billion monthly users. For context, ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users, suggesting ChatGPT sees more frequent repeated engagement, while Google reaches more unique people across its AI features in a month.

The publisher problem

Combined, these changes will likely deepen the toll on publisher referral traffic, which has already been decimated since AI Overviews launched. Some ad-dependent media operations have already been pushed out of business. The UK CMA has been pressuring Google to let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without losing search visibility, a request Google has yet to act on.

The new search box arrives this week. Generative UI rolls out free to everyone this summer. Information agents and mini-app building launch first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer, with broader free access planned for Spark and other AI features down the line.

Sundar Pichai framed it as an accessibility play. “Part of the reason we focus on delivering frontier models—highly capable, but also very efficient, fast, and at a lower price—is because we want to bring it to as many people as possible,” he said in a press briefing ahead of I/O.

For publishers, there is very little time left to adapt.

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Google tags AI overview links from publications you subscribe to https://mediacopilot.ai/google-tags-ai-overview-links-subscribed-publications/ Thu, 07 May 2026 17:25:27 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=6434 Editorial still life of subscription cards and citation evidence with AI summary panelsGoogle will now label AI search results from publications you pay for, part of a broader citation update.

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Google will now highlight when AI-generated search responses include information from publications a user already pays for, the company announced Wednesday. It’s a change that could help subscription publishers recapture readers lost to AI Overviews.

The new “Subscribed” label appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode when the content draws from a publication the user has linked to their Google account. In early testing, Google said people were “significantly more likely” to click through to a webpage bearing the label. The feature is part of a broader set of citation updates that also include hover-triggered website previews and a stated increase in the number of publisher links appearing alongside AI-generated answers.

The timing is notable. Publishers have reported steep drops in search referrals since Google launched AI Overviews in 2024. Press Gazette reported earlier this year that referral traffic from search engines fell 60% for small publishers and 47% for medium publishers over the two-year period that broadly coincides with AI Overviews’ rollout.

Google is also expanding a “Further Exploration” section that recommends related topics and deeper analysis below AI summaries. A new “Expert Advice” panel will surface content from Reddit and other social forums, showing snippets of user discussions alongside creator handles. The move underscores Reddit’s growing weight in Google’s search experience; the company signed a content licensing deal with Reddit reportedly worth $60 million per year in 2024.

More details on the updates are available on Google’s blog.

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Court dismisses Arkansas publishers’ antitrust suit against Google https://mediacopilot.ai/publishers-antitrust-google-dismissed-mehta/ Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:41:36 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=5608 Small newspaper building dwarfed by a glowing Google search page with a gavel on the ground between them — illustrating the dismissed antitrust lawsuitA federal judge tossed an antitrust case against Google, not because Google is innocent, but because the claims came too late.

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A federal judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit brought by two Arkansas news publishers against Google, ruling that they lack standing to sue over the general search market and that key claims are too old to pursue — even as the judge acknowledged Google’s monopoly power in blunt terms.

Key Takeaways

  • Judge Mehta dismissed publishers’ antitrust case against Google.
  • The ruling limits legal options for challenging Google’s search hold.
  • Publishers must now look to legislation rather than courts for relief.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, writing in a 41-page opinion, dismissed the case filed in 2023 by Helena World Chronicle and Emmerich Newspapers. The publishers argued Google had leveraged its search dominance to effectively become “America’s largest news publisher” — monopolizing the online news market, diverting their traffic, and depriving them of licensing revenue without paying for it.

Mehta didn’t dispute the underlying picture. “The acquisitions of Android, YouTube, and DeepMind may very well have been anticompetitive,” he wrote. “But Plaintiffs are 10 to 20 years too late; those claims are now stale.” The conduct that built Google’s dominance happened too long ago to sue over. The statute of limitations swallowed the core of the case.

On the market definition, Mehta found a structural problem: the publishers aren’t competitors in the general search market — they’re publishers of news content. Their alleged injuries (lost traffic, lost licensing fees, higher production costs) happen in the news publishing market, not the search market. That mismatch undercut their antitrust standing. The judge also dismissed the tying claim — that Google forced users into its search ecosystem as a condition of using Android — finding it inadequately pleaded.

The ruling is appealable, and the case remains on file with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The outcome is discouraging but not surprising. Small regional publishers face enormous structural barriers in antitrust litigation against Google — the legal bar for market definition and monopoly power in adjacent markets is high, discovery is expensive, and the statute of limitations problem is real. The conduct that matters most happened years ago, and courts have been reluctant to retroactively reach it.

It’s worth noting that Judge Mehta is the same judge who ruled last year that Google illegally maintained its search monopoly in the DOJ case — so his skepticism of the publishers’ theory here isn’t a vindication of Google, just a finding that these particular plaintiffs, with this particular theory, didn’t clear the legal threshold. The broader question of what Google’s search dominance means for publishers is very much unsettled. The appeals court will have the final word.

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Breaking news is up 103% on Google as AI Overviews gut everything else https://mediacopilot.ai/breaking-news-google-ai-overviews-discover-traffic/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:04:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=5427 AI Overviews have cut publisher search traffic nearly in half, but breaking news is way up.

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Google’s AI Overviews have cut organic search traffic to publishers by 42%. However, one content type is not just surviving the disruption, it’s growing. Breaking news is up 103% across Google surfaces since November 2024, according to new data from Define Media Group, which manages a panel of major U.S. news publishers.

Key Takeaways

  • Google AI Overviews cut publisher organic search traffic by 42% overall.
  • Breaking-news traffic is up 103% since November 2024 via Top Stories.
  • Publishers winning organic distribution are the ones moving fastest on news.

The reason is structural. AI Overviews have a 15% visibility rate for news queries—nearly three times lower than health and science content—and breaking news queries like “Iran war” currently don’t trigger AI Overviews at all. Instead, Google surfaces the Top Stories carousel: image cards with headlines that drive clicks through to publisher sites. LLMs can’t summarize breaking news fast enough, and the hallucination risk is too high, so Google has left that real estate largely untouched.

Define’s data makes the divergence stark. Evergreen content is down 40%. Breaking news is up 103%. Every other content category is declining. The publishers still generating Google search traffic are, for now, the ones with the fastest news operations.

The bigger finding, though, is about Discover. While breaking news in web search has held up, Discover is what’s actually driving the growth. For the first time in Define’s history, Discover and web search send equal amounts of traffic to their publisher panel. And when you isolate breaking news by surface, Discover is responsible for nearly all of the gains — with a step-change increase after Google’s December 2025 Core Update, followed by the first-ever Discover-specific Core Update in February.

The implication is pointed. Discover has historically been treated as a byproduct of search optimization: tune your SEO and Discover traffic follows. Define’s data suggests that’s no longer sufficient. Discover is maturing into its own system with its own signals, and publishers that treat it as a standalone channel—rather than a side effect of search—are the ones positioned to capture what’s left of Google’s referral traffic.

We’ve tracked the broader traffic collapse from AI Overviews before. What Define adds is precision: the hole in the dam is real, but breaking news is still flowing through it, and Discover is becoming the pipe.

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European publishers sue Google over AI training on news articles https://mediacopilot.ai/europe-publishers-google-ai-lawsuit/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=3928 Traffic to publisher websites has dropped 33 percent since Google started using their content to train AI.

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On Feb. 10, the European Publishers Council filed a complaint with European Union authorities alleging Google mines press articles to train its artificial intelligence tools without permission or payment to newsrooms. The organization represents hundreds of media outlets across the continent.

Key Takeaways

  • European Publishers Council filed an EU complaint over Google AI training.
  • Publisher traffic is down 33% since Google began surfacing AI summaries.
  • A favorable ruling could set global precedent on AI compensation for news.

The complaint targets Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. These summaries pull from news articles written by journalists but provide no compensation to the publishers who produced them, according to the council.

“This complaint is not about resisting innovation or artificial intelligence,” Christian van Thillo, the council’s chairman, said in a statement. “It is about stopping a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers any realistic way to protect their journalism.”

The numbers tell a stark story. According to an analysis by Debug Lies, Google’s AI previews have reduced publishers’ traffic by 33 percent worldwide since their deployment. Fewer clicks means fewer visitors and less advertising revenue for news organizations already struggling with business model challenges.

Publishers face what the council calls an impossible choice. Google offers tools that let websites opt out of AI previews, but doing so also means losing visibility in traditional search results. Media outlets must either accept that their work feeds Google’s AI for free or become invisible to internet users searching for news.

The complaint arrives as European regulators are already investigating Google’s search engine practices. The European Commission opened an investigation in December 2025. Teresa Ribera, EU executive vice president, mentioned emergency measures in February 2026 to limit damage to the media sector without waiting for the investigation’s conclusion.

If authorities side with publishers, Google could be forced to deploy an automated compensation system similar to the 2019 European copyright directive but on a much larger scale.

For newsrooms, the case raises a fundamental question about the future of the web: Who pays when artificial intelligence feeds on human journalism? The European decision could set a global precedent for how tech platforms compensate media companies whose content trains AI systems.

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Google signals it may let publishers opt out of AI search features https://mediacopilot.ai/google-publishers-opt-out-ai-search-uk-cma/ Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000 https://mediacopilot.ai/?p=3622 UK regulatory pressure prompts the company to explore new controls — with caveats.

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Google says it’s “exploring” giving publishers the ability to opt out of having their content appear in AI-generated search features like AI Overviews. The move, first reported by Reuters, comes as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal consultation on new conduct requirements for the search giant.

Key Takeaways

  • Google is “exploring” an AI-search opt-out after UK CMA pressure.
  • Reverses a May 2025 internal decision against publisher granular control.
  • Final terms will decide if the toggle is real or a face-saving concession.

The announcement marks a notable reversal. As recently as May 2025, internal Google documents revealed the company had deliberately decided against giving publishers granular control over AI search features. Now, facing regulatory pressure, Google’s Ron Eden wrote in a company blog post that the goal is “to protect the helpfulness of Search for people who want information quickly, while also giving websites the right tools to manage their content.”

Why this matters for newsrooms

News websites and other publishers have seen click-through rates drop sharply as users rely on AI-generated overviews instead of clicking through to original articles. Google, which controls more than 90 percent of search queries in Britain, uses content harvested by its search crawler to build AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as standalone products like its Gemini assistant.

The CMA’s proposal addresses this directly: it wants publishers to be able to opt out of Google’s AI features without affecting their position in general search results. That’s the critical distinction. Currently, blocking AI features means blocking search visibility entirely—an unacceptable tradeoff for most publishers.

“These targeted and proportionate actions would give UK businesses and consumers more choice and control,” said CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell. “They would also provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organisations, over how their content is used in Google’s AI Overviews.”

The fine print

Google’s response suggests this won’t be a simple on/off switch. Eden emphasized that “any new controls need to avoid breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people.” Translation: Google won’t implement controls that significantly reduce AI Overview coverage.

The CMA is also proposing changes to make search result rankings “fair and transparent” and to make it easier for users to choose alternative search engines—broader competition measures that go beyond the publisher opt-out question.

The consultation runs through February 25, 2026. Publishers can submit comments through the CMA’s dedicated portal.

What to do now

News organizations should consider:

  • Submitting comments to the CMA consultation before the February 25 deadline
  • Auditing current robots.txt and Google-Extended settings to understand your existing posture
  • Monitoring referral traffic from AI Overviews specifically (available in Search Console)
  • Coordinating with industry groups like the News Media Alliance or INMA on collective responses

This won’t be the last word. Google’s hedged language—”exploring,” not “implementing”—leaves room to water down eventual controls. But the CMA’s specific demand that opt-outs not affect general search rankings puts real teeth behind the proposal.

The post Google signals it may let publishers opt out of AI search features appeared first on The Media Copilot.

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