The CMA's requirement covers three things that matter to publishers: the ability to keep content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, the ability to keep it out of AI model training, and clearer attribution with direct links when content is used in AI answers. Google has said opting out will not affect where a site ranks in standard results.
Google has added a site-level setting to Search Console. Page-level and directory-level control, which is what most publishers actually want, is due within nine months of the order, so by around March 2027. The control does not cover every Google AI product: the Gemini app sits outside it.
Why few publishers will switch it on yet
The difficulty is evidence. Publishers can see how often they appear in AI features, but not yet how many clicks those appearances send. Without that, nobody can say whether AI Overviews are sending readers or replacing them. Opting out also removes a site from AI features entirely, and AI Mode and AI Overviews are switched off together. For an advertising-funded site, giving up any visibility is a serious risk.
An opt-out is only useful if you can measure what you would be giving up.
What to get ready now
- Which sections of the site carry your most valuable content: investigations, reviews, data, archives
- How search traffic to those sections has moved since AI Overviews launched in the UK
- Whether your CMS could mark a section or page for opt-out once Google supports it
- What your robots.txt and AI crawler rules currently say, and who keeps them current
- Who decides, and on what evidence, whether a section opts out
A job for the CMS, not just the SEO team
When page-level controls arrive, publishers will want to opt out some content and keep the rest visible. That decision will need to live in the CMS, set by section, content type or individual article, and output correctly on every page. A structured content model makes this straightforward. A site where every page is built by hand makes it a manual job on every story.
If you want to be able to act when the controls arrive, the time to plan the CMS side is now. We help publishers work out what that needs and build it into the platform.
