Judge Mehta's AI Overviews ruling turns publishers' lost search traffic into a business problem

The first person to feel this ruling is whoever at a publisher decides which pages Google may summarize. Judge Mehta's opinion tells that person how a court sees the deal they thought they had. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," Mehta wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." ^[3]

He wrote that the court is not "unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in," but that antitrust rules cannot replace a legislative body's decision on the economic impact of "new innovation" ^[7].

Here is what publishing teams tell themselves readers do: read the summary, then click through for the full piece. The two plaintiffs built their case on that pattern breaking. They argued that AI Overviews drew traffic away from their ad businesses ^[4]. Here is what the available reporting says readers do. The Verge reports a steep drop in traffic to news outlets and small websites since Google's AI search overhaul ^[9], and Engadget notes that AI Mode and AI Overviews take up more and more of the results page ^[13]. Neither outlet puts a number on the decline, and The Verge is part of Penske Media, one of the plaintiffs ^[11].

With these suits dismissed, the remaining options are commercial. One is the opt-out Engadget describes ^[12]. The other is licensing, and the only public reference point is the pilot The Information reported ^[10].

Before choosing either, I would sort a site's top search pages on two axes. The first is whether a short summary fully answers the query the page ranks for. The second is whether the page makes its money on the visit, through ads, or after it, through a subscription or a sale.

Ad-funded pages that a summary can answer are the most exposed corner. They are the cheapest place to test the opt-out, and they are where a licensing payment would matter most. Pages a summary cannot answer, and that sell something after the click, are the least exposed. Leave them eligible. In the two mixed corners, measurement decides. Judge those pages by referral sessions from Google and revenue per session, month over month. Showing up inside an AI Overview does not put a reader on the publisher's page, and lost traffic was what the plaintiffs sued over ^[4].

I would start the opt-out on a sample of pages from the exposed corner and keep a matched set eligible for comparison. The tradeoff is that opted-out pages give up any clicks the summary was still sending. What they keep is a listing on a results page where Google's AI features take up more of the space ^[13].