Google is introducing new tools that give website operators more control over how their content appears in AI-powered search features. The company says AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, with AI Mode surpassing one billion. A new toggle in Google Search Console will let site operators choose whether their content appears in AI search features like AI Overviews or AI Mode. Sites that opt out won't get traffic from these features, but they will still receive normal search traffic. Google also announced new performance reports that break out impressions, pages, countries, and devices for AI features separately. Source: thedecoder
The new features will initially be tested in the UK, partly due to pressure from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The CMA issued a first-of-its-kind code of conduct targeting Google, which requires the company to let publishers remove their content from AI search features, clearly attribute sources in AI-generated search results with links, and only fine-tune AI models on publisher content with their consent. Publishers who opt out face a potential loss of visibility, but Google has plenty of other material to build answers from, including Reddit, Wikipedia, forums, SEO pages, and its own data. Source: thedecoder
Google takes big chunks of the web through its AI answers and sends little traffic back to the sites that made those answers possible. A recent New York Times study found Google's AI answers are right more than 90 percent of the time. That still leaves millions of wrong answers every hour. However, the accuracy is enough to break people of the habit of clicking through to websites. Hardly anyone taps a source link in an AI answer. Features like 'Preferred Sources' won't fix that. Publishers who play along are slowly bargaining away whatever leverage they have left. Source: thedecoder
