Google’s latest update to its search engine, called AI Mode, has sparked strong criticism from major news publishers across the United States. The News/Media Alliance, a group representing many top news organisations, says the new feature takes content without permission and could hurt publishers’ earnings and online traffic badly.
What is Google’s new AI Mode?
On May 14, Google announced at its annual developer event, Google I/O, that it was rolling out a new search version for all users in the United States. This feature, known as AI Mode, replaces the usual list of search results with answers generated by artificial intelligence. When you type a question into Google, instead of seeing only links to websites, you now see an AI-written summary with some related links beneath it.
The idea is to give you a quicker, more direct answer. However, publishers argue that this change makes users less likely to click through to news websites, which means fewer visitors and less advertising revenue for publishers.
Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of the News/Media Alliance, shared a strong statement on May 15 criticising the move. “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” she said. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, which is the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”
Concerns about permission and fairness
The row deepened when a confidential internal document from Google was revealed during its ongoing antitrust trial. The document, shared in court this week, showed that Google chose not to ask publishers for permission to include their content in the new AI search results.
Instead, if publishers want their work removed from AI Mode, they must opt out of Google Search completely. This move would mean losing all search traffic, which is not a realistic choice for most news organisations.
This decision has angered many in the news industry, who feel trapped. The only way to protect their content from being used by Google’s AI is to disappear from search results entirely—a huge loss for any publisher trying to reach an online audience.
Google’s defence of AI Mode
Liz Reid, who leads Google Search, defended the company’s approach in court. She explained that it would be too complicated to let publishers pick and choose which parts of the Search they want their content to appear in.
“By saying a publisher could be like, ‘I want to be in this feature but not that feature,’ it doesn’t work,” she said, according to Bloomberg. “Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.”
Reid argues that the technology behind AI Mode is not flexible enough to allow such selective control. Still, this explanation offers little comfort for news publishers who rely on search traffic to survive.
As the U.S. Department of Justice continues its legal case against Google’s dominance in search, the conflict between tech giants and news publishers is heating up. Publishers are urging regulators to take stronger steps to ensure content creators are treated fairly and given a real choice about how their work is used.
