Brussels asks publishers whether Google's AI opt-out is a real choice

The European Commission sent publishers a questionnaire in July asking whether they intend to use Google’s opt-out for AI search, what would make them use it, and how they view Google’s decision in May to merge AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single AI Search experience. Responses were due on 28 August. The questionnaire is not itself an investigation: it is the Commission testing whether there is enough evidence to escalate beyond the formal probe it opened in December 2025.

Why this matters

The question Brussels is asking is the one that matters to every small publisher in Europe: is the opt-out a genuine choice, or a choice between having your work summarised without payment and losing your search traffic altogether? For anyone who relies on organic search to reach readers, opting out of AI summaries currently risks opting out of visibility. That is a decision independent publishers are being asked to make with no good options, and it is now a decision a regulator is examining rather than one left to the market.

Context

The French press alliance APIG filed a complaint with France’s competition authority in August over AI Overviews, citing referral traffic falls of 33 to 38% among its members. A US judge hearing Penske Media’s antitrust case against Google in late August pushed back on the company’s characterisation of AI Overviews as a product improvement. The pattern across all three is the same argument: other AI companies pay for content while Google takes the same inputs at no cost on the strength of its position in search.

What to watch

Whether the Commission escalates from questionnaire to formal action, and whether any remedy separates the AI-summary decision from the search-indexing decision. Publishers can currently only meaningfully choose between both or neither.