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Before Google trained on half the web anyway, it floated six opt-out tiers that would have let publishers throttle indexing, training, or SGE display. The newly unsealed DOJ remedies slide lays out those options. And proof that meaningful publisher control was little more than a talking point. (No public discourse was held involving publishers that we are aware of). Google has not responded to our request for comment.
The deck listed polite-sounding options, then crossed out the only one that protected publisher data. Product leads wrote that grounding will be “a space for monetization,” so the door was slammed in publishers faces.
Google’s public fix feels like a trap. Add the NOSNIPPET tag, and AI Overviews lose your copy. You also lose thumbnails, headlines, and prime pixel space. Google’s own experiment showed news traffic collapsed by 45 percent when snippets vanished.
Testimony made the pill even harder to swallow. VP Eli Collins confirmed that Search teams can train Gemini-powered Overviews on any page the crawler touches, even when DeepMind respects an opt-out. The wall has a back door.
A lose-lose choice for newsrooms
Publishers face two options: accept scraping, or block Googlebot and vanish from the dominant search engine. Matt Rogerson of the Financial Times called it an “unenviable choice,” highlighting how the policy undercuts licensing talks for high-value journalism.
Action plan for SEOs: audit robots.txt and meta tags today. Mark premium copy with DATA-NOSNIPPET. Throttle crawl on low-value sections. Build email, social, and RSS funnels so clicks do not depend on snippets. Track every AI Overview citation in your logs and bring the data to Pubcon Chicago, where we will trade strategies and receipts.
The slide recaps the options they thought to offer:
Recap of options: How granular should the control functionality on Search be for publishers?
- NO new controls (Likely unstable)
Option #1: No new controls on Search. No change to how existing controls work.
Pubs can opt-out of or limit display of their content. If not satisfied, they can choose to opt out of indexing. - NO new controls (Likely unstable)
Option #2: No new controls BUT reposition publicly that no snippet impacts more than display
Pubs can use no snippet to impose a limit on how much content is used for grounding & display | Today, positioned as display only - Create NEW SRP-wide controls (for discussion)
Option #3: Introduce granularity at content level for publishers to opt out of indexing
Pubs can choose to have sections of their content excluded from indexing, training, and display. (div level no index) - Create NEW SRP-wide controls (for discussion)
Option #4: Introduce granularity at display level for publishers to opt out. NEW! Variation Option #4A
Pubs can choose to have their content excluded from answer-forward features (i.e. Web Answers), but not from Web Snippets or ranking. - SGE-only opt-outs (for discussion)
Option #5: Introduce a separation of SGE display and SRP display
Pubs can choose to opt their content out of being displayed within SGE features | Data would still be used for training purposes - SGE-only opt-outs (Hard Red Line)
Option #6: Introduce a separation of grounding vs training for SGE
Pubs can choose to opt out of their data being used for grounding – Their content won’t be used for any retrieval-augmented generation
As the CEO and founder of Pubcon Inc., Brett Tabke has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of online marketing and search engine optimization. His journey in the computer industry has spanned over three decades and has made him a pioneering force behind digital evolution. Full Bio
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