The UK government urges Google to allow websites to opt out of the "AI Overview" feature

Tech Home January 30th News, according to Reuters yesterday, the UK government has asked Google to make adjustments to its search services, including allowing website operators and publishers not to include their content in the “AI Overviews” feature or use it for training independent AI models.

Before these proposals were introduced, the UK government’s antitrust regulator CMA had already defined Google as a company with a “strategic market position” in October last year, considering moderate and targeted interventions to ensure effective competition in the general search service sector.

It is reported that Google Search currently holds over 90% market share in the UK. The company uses its crawled content to build “AI Overviews” and “AI Models,” which are also used for independent products like Gemini.

At the same time, as users increasingly rely on AI-generated overview content, click rates for news websites and other publishers have dropped significantly. Therefore, CMA hopes Google can provide an option to opt out of the “AI Overviews” feature without affecting the ranking of regular search results, thereby rebalancing the interests of all parties.

The agency also hopes Google will adjust its search result ranking mechanism to ensure fairer and more transparent sorting, making it easier for users to choose other search engines.