A court document from the Department of Justice Google monopoly case shows Google internally discussed six different options for giving (or not giving) publishers control over AI usage. The options range from do nothing new to add options to opt out of just AI Overviews (formerly known as SGE).
The document was posted by Nate Hake on X who wrote, "Google won't even let website owners **choose** if AI Mode scrapes our content. "Court docs show Google debated it internally but drew a "hard red line" against giving publishers choice," he added and then shared this document.
Here is a screenshot of the document:
As you can see, the title of the slide says "Recap of options: How granular should the control functionality on Search be for publishers?"
Then it lists these six options, from hard red line to for discussion to likely unstable. The interesting thing, Google seemed to go with option two, the "likely unstable" option - unless I am mistaken. Google even posted a help document on blocking content from AI features.
Option #1: No new controls on Search. No change to how existing controls work. This is no added new controls and "Publishers can opt-out of or limit display of their content. If not satisfied, they can choose to opt out of indexing."
Option #2: No new controls BUT reposition publicly that no snippet impacts more than display. This is also no added new controls and "Publishers can use no snippet to impose a limit on how much content is used for grounding and display. Today, positioned as display only," it says.
Option #3: Introduce granularity at content level for publishers to opt out of indexing. This creates a new control, "Publishers can choose to have sections of their content excluded from indexing, training, and display. (div level no index)."
Option #4: Introduce granularity at display level for publishers to opt out. NEW! Variation Option #4A. This also creates a new control, "Publishers can choose to have their content excluded from answer-forward features (i.e. Web Answers), but not from Web Snippets or ranking."
Option #5: Introduce a separation of SGE display and SRP display. This is also a new control but an opt out, "Publishers can choose to opt their content out of being displayed within SGE features but the data would still be used for training purposes."
Option #6: Introduce a separation of grounding vs training for SGE. Also a new control, but only to opt out, "Publishers can choose to opt out of their data being used for grounding. "Their content won't be used for any retrieval augmented generation," Google added.
I do think Google should give us more controls.
Forum discussion at X.
