Action must now be taken following the decision to designate the Big Tech monolith with strategic market status.
Pegged by the UK Government as a ‘world first’ move, Britain’s Competitions & Markets Authority (CMA) is giving online publishers ‘effective tools’ to stop their content being used to power artificial intelligence features in search functionality. This includes, but is not limited to, AI Overviews, a relatively new introduction that produces automated summaries to user queries by amalgamating information from a multitude of websites.
Crucially, these responses do not provide backlinks or citations for original articles, and have been blamed for a monumental fall in traffic to news websites in territories where the function has gone line. According to the Pew Research Center, click-throughs to results where AI summaries were present happened in just 8% of visits to Google, down from 15% where no automated response was included. In the worst cases, publishers have lost up to 90% of traffic as a result of the system, devastating advertising value.
The CMA’s decision to act follows months of campaigning by press and publisher unions. The legal policy change also forces Google to include clear links to source material within any AI-generated search result. While both these moves will make it easier for users to access original work, it is also hoped that they will put editorial platforms in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with the world’s dominant search engine.
‘With features like AI Overviews rapidly reshaping online search, it is crucial that content publishers, including news organisations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used. At the same time, these measures will help tens of millions of UK search users better understand and trust the information presented to them,’ said Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA.
‘It’s also important that any action we take in this space can move with the times,’ she continued. ‘Google has recently announced changes to its search business and the requirements we’ve introduced today are designed to respond to what Google is doing now and in the future. We’ll also continue to use the unique flexibility of the UK regime to monitor and address future concerns as they arise and we will be announcing further action in relation to Google’s search business in the coming weeks.’
Image: Nathana Rebouças / Unsplash
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