A new case against Google in EU and UK hopes to give publishers an opt-out of crawling
By Luciani Gomes, Media Policy Specialist, Brazil
Foxglove recently filed a complaint against Google AI Overviews before the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Rosa Curling, Foxglove Co-Executive Director, delivered an exclusive brief to the WAN-IFRA Member Associations’ Committee on what she defines an “existential threat to independent news“.
The complaints have been submitted in partnership with Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web (MOW), and request interim measures to “prevent serious irreparable harm to competition and to ensure access to news“.
The document filed with competition regulators details how the tech giant uses its dominant position in the search market to benefit from content owners’ dependency, developing and promoting a company product while demoting rivals.
Google uses the content it indexes to train its AI and generate its AI Overviews (AIO) answers, placed at the top of the results page, pushing down traditional search results, the complaint explains. That way, traditional search results become less and less clicked-through, impacting traffic and revenue potential. Publishers are neither compensated for the use of their material, nor are given the option to remain indexed but protect their materials from being used for free, it adds.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” states the complaint.
Since Google launched its AIO tool, delivering and prioritizing AI generated answers instead of search prompts, concern has been growing among publishers about the future of search and the internet as we know it. Publishers have been experiencing a decline in referral traffic for a while now, and are fearful of what is to come in an era that is becoming known in the industry as “zero click”.
Fast growing use of summaries
The amount of keywords triggering AIOs is only growing. Google has told investors that, in Q1 2025, 1.5 billion people a month were getting AIO results for online queries. According to a study conducted by Semrush, cited in the complaint, there has been a 91% increase from the end of 2024 to March 2025. While Google claims it doesn’t aim to show AIO for hard news topics, evidence shows the opposite.
Additionally, a study conducted by Authoritas in April 2025, also mentioned in the document, demonstrated that searches for a curated set of news-related keywords, categorised as ‘current specific news stories’, generated AIOs for 12.5% of them. For “old specific news stories” keywords, those making headlines on or before May 2024, 30.3% have generated AIO, while for “Generic News” keywords it has been 13.4%.
And when a sample of keywords and their average desktop clickthrough rate per month in March 2024 (pre-AIO roll out) and in March 2025 (post-AIO roll out) was compared, it showed a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page.
In a statement shared with the press, Google says “new AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered”. Precisely where both sides disagree: publishers don’t think creating opportunities for them to be discovered or seen.
Betting on the new format, Google has recently rolled out ads appearing both alongside and within the summaries, for specific markets. According to the explanation given by the AIO itself, “this expansion allows advertisers to connect with users earlier in their search journey,” reinforcing the importance the visibility it is taking away from news publishers and content producers it indexes.
Industry urges remedies
To counter the impact publishers are already seeing (and fearing) in their numbers and protect publishers of the long-term consequences of a full shift to AIO, the authors of the complaint request authorities in the EU and the UK take urgent action and put in place interim measures to “prevent serious irreparable harm to competition” and ensure access to news on search.
The complaint lists that publishers should 1) be given the right to opt-out of having their content crawled, scraped and ingested to train AI, while being ensured that they will continue to be indexed and shown as part of Google’s general search. And 2) Google should provide fair compensation for all publisher content it uses, a measure that has already been proposed by other leading regulators, such as the US Department of Justice and the South African Competition Commission.
Up until now, antitrust efforts against Google aimed at retrospect and focused on practices such as being the default search engine of devices, dominating the ads market and choking up the business media by dominating the advertising industry – years after these dynamics had been consolidated.
The fight is now to correct course before irreversible damage is done for news publishers – and before new rules and market dynamics have become so established it feels impossible to change them, once again.
“If Google is not prevented now from misusing other’s data and content it may be able to tip the market into total dependency; meaning that any proposed conduct remedy will be pointless and ineffective,” urge the authors.
