The UK’s AI opt-out: what it covers, and what Foxglove says is missing

The problem

According to Squirrell, Google, which holds about 90% of the search market, uses publishers’ content in AI Overviews and AI Mode without compensation or meaningful consent, and without properly attributing it. These features appear above organic search results and push them down the page, which reduces traffic to publishers. Foxglove’s June 2025 complaint to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) documented traffic drops of up to 79% for some UK publishers.

Squirrell said publishers could not opt out of AI features without also losing search, because Google uses the same crawler for both. “If you block their crawler to try and get out of AI, you disappear from search entirely,” he said.

He also described how Google is testing payment. Confidential deals linked to Google News Showcase include non-disclosure agreements and clauses preventing publishers from suing. Google is also trialling payments based on a publisher’s contribution to AI Overviews, calculated by Google. “They hold all the cards in any negotiation,” he said.

“The journalists and newsrooms run all of the upfront costs of fixed costs of creating media and creating journalism, and then Google reaps the profit.”

How Foxglove is responding

Foxglove treats the issue as an abuse of a dominant position and works with publishers to take it to competition regulators. In the UK, it called on the CMA to require a publisher opt-out from June 2025.

On 3 June 2026, after designating Google with strategic market status in general search, the CMA imposed a binding conduct requirement. Publishers can opt out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and broader generative AI services, at directory and page level, without harm to their ranking in ordinary search. Google must credit content it uses with a direct link, and following consultation, the CMA added an opt-out from AI fine-tuning. Google has six months to implement most requirements and nine for the page-level opt-out. Foxglove welcomed the measures but said implementation needs to be faster, and noted that the CMA dropped an earlier proposal for compliance reporting to be done initially by an independent auditor.

As Squirrell set out, they want to ensure that journalists are paid for the use of their content. They also want the CMA and other regulators to go further, based on the following four principles:

1. Consent. Publishers should be able to remove whole sites or single pages from AI products, with no ranking penalty. “If you can only remove your site, then you dilute all of the good stuff with really bad stuff.”
2. Verification. Google currently audits itself. Publishers and regulators should be able to check independently that opt-outs are respected, which Foxglove says requires Google to separate its search and AI crawlers.
3. Attribution. All AI products should give full, prominent links to every source used. Google has argued in consultations that this would make its products harder to use. Squirrell disagreed: “This is not a particularly challenging engineering problem.”
4. Transparency. Google should disclose the information publishers need to negotiate compensation fairly. Squirrell said Foxglove would not prescribe what compensation should look like, as that is “for journalists themselves to work out.”

Foxglove has also worked with organisations in the EU and Brazil. For more cases, see GFMD’s news compensation briefing:

• EU. On 9 December 2025, the European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google’s use of publisher and YouTube content for AI, following a 2025 complaint from Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web.
• Brazil. Foxglove worked with Brazilian organisations, including Momentum and Abraji, on submissions to CADE, the competition authority. On 23 April 2026, CADE’s Tribunal voted unanimously to open a formal administrative proceeding against Google for possible exploitative abuse of a dominant position in its use of news content, including through AI tools.

“Transparency is mainly useful for everyone who can’t make a deal,” Squirrell said. He added that in some jurisdictions, publishers may need an antitrust exemption to bargain collectively.

What our community can do

“They consistently say: we need more evidence,” Squirrell said of competition authorities. Foxglove asks publishers and media organisations to:

• Share evidence with competition authorities, in confidence if needed: impressions, clicks and click-through rates before and after AI Overviews launched; effects on revenue and subscriptions; and comparable YouTube metrics, which Squirrell said are in scope of the EU investigation.
• Share communications or contracts Google has offered or imposed, where possible. Squirrell acknowledged this can be sensitive, but said it shows regulators what kinds of deals Google is trying to strike.
• Engage competition authorities, including those that have not opened investigations, and political representatives.
• Engage in public calls for action, and provide data and information where possible. Foxglove is drafting public asks.
• Cover the issue. “This issue doesn’t get covered enough in media outlets,” Squirrell noted.

Brazil shows why evidence from many countries matters. Paula Miraglia, founder and CEO of Momentum, said CADE received many contributions from civil society as it decided whether to open its inquiry, including Momentum’s technical submission and the work Foxglove did with Brazilian organisations. Data from different regions helped show that the harm was a global trend, not just the experience of one media organisation, as platforms often argue. “Global data was key to inform this inquiry,” she said.