News — On 11 August 2026, the Alliance de la presse d'information générale (APIG), which represents nearly 300 French daily newspapers, filed a complaint with France's competition authority over Google's rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode in France, arguing that the unilateral deployment breaches commitments made binding in 2022 (APIG, via Euronews, 11 August 2026).
The dispute is legal. The lesson is technical, and it applies to every site, not just newspapers. What APIG describes in its filing is a choice Google allegedly put to publishers: accept an amendment to their existing licence contract, or technically remove their content and risk losing visibility in the search engine. That choice is not a negotiating stance. It follows from how AI Overviews are built.
What APIG actually alleges
The organisation is not contesting Google's right to ship AI features. It is contesting the method. In July 2022, Google gave commitments before the French competition authority to negotiate in good faith, with transparency and non-discrimination, towards press publishers. Those commitments were made binding and run until 2027. For APIG, "the unilateral deployment of new uses of press content, without prior authorisation or dedicated remuneration" breaches them.
Marc Feuillée, APIG's president, framed the ask: "The editors are not seeking to halt innovation. They are asking for this value to be shared, and for compensation of the use of their content." Google, for its part, says AI Overviews "help people ask more complex questions, discover new content, and give publishers tools to manage how their content appears."
The history matters: Google was already fined €500 million in July 2021 for failing to negotiate in good faith, then €250 million in 2024 for failing to comply with those same commitments.
The figures cited
Both studies look at news publishers, not corporate sites. A B2B site or a services SME has no mechanical reason to see the same magnitude. But the direction of travel is consistent with what we already tracked on how traffic and clicks are shifting inside Google's results.
The part that concerns you: there is no clean opt-out
This is the heart of the matter, and it is verifiable in Google's own documentation. To exit AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google offers no dedicated lever. Its documentation on AI features in Search states that robots.txt directives for Googlebot are the control for site owners, and that nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what is shown from your pages.
Those directives do not distinguish AI from the rest. nosnippet removes you from AI Overviews, but it also kills your classic snippet under the blue link. noindex removes you from both, and from Search entirely.
The Google-Extended token, often cited as the answer, does not solve it: Google specifies that it governs AI training and grounding in other Google systems, not appearance in Search's AI features. Setting it does not take you out of AI Overviews.
Key point: at Google, the index feeding AI Overviews is the same one feeding classic results. Refusing AI means reducing your organic visibility. That is structurally different from third-party AI crawlers, which you can block without touching your rankings.
The comparison is instructive. Against OpenAI or Perplexity, a publisher can block the AI crawler and keep its Google rankings intact, which is exactly the mechanism Cloudflare is industrialising by blocking AI bots by default. At Google, that decoupling does not exist. That is what gives APIG's filing its weight: it is not asking for a button, it is asking to be paid, because it cannot refuse without penalising itself.
What this changes for a small business
First, stop looking for the off switch. If an agency or a CMS promises to "disable AI Overviews" at no cost, ask for the exact directive. There is only one family of them, and it costs you your search snippet.
Second, the useful question is no longer "how do I get out" but "how do I get cited". Since ingestion is effectively non-negotiable, the variable still under your control is selection: which sources the model keeps and attributes. That is the same ground as AI citations won by pages ranking outside the classic top 10, where clarity of answer matters more than incumbency.
Third, watch how the case lands. If the authority sides with APIG, the precedent will cover press publishers and neighbouring rights, not commercial sites. Nobody is going to pay you for your product pages. But a binding decision could force Google to document finer-grained controls, and those would benefit everyone.
The limits of this reading
Three caveats, to stay honest. The filing is a complaint, not a ruling: at this stage the authority has decided nothing, and APIG's grievances remain allegations. Competition proceedings run in months, sometimes years, though interim measures can come faster.
Next, the 33-38% and 42% figures come from studies of news sites, a format especially exposed to summarisation because its value often fits in three sentences. Extrapolating them to a services site or an online store would be dishonest.
Finally, this article covers neither neighbouring rights in the strict sense nor the separate EU-level investigation into publishers' content being used by AI services. Those are distinct proceedings on their own timelines.
The Cicero take
The French press is fighting to be paid. You won't have that recourse: no legal text provides for compensating an SME whose spec sheet feeds an AI summary. The only lever left is to be the source the model picks and names, rather than the raw material it silently aggregates.
This case has one merit: it makes explicit what many companies had not yet put into words. You no longer choose whether to enter the AI layer. You only choose whether you enter it identifiable, or not.
Sources
- → Euronews : APIG's filing with the French competition authority, 11 August 2026, including Google's response.
- → BDM : detail of the July 2022 commitments and the studies cited (Arcom: 33-38%; Define Media Group: 42% across 64 sites), 11 August 2026.
- → Google Search Central : official documentation on the controls that apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode (robots.txt, nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet) and the scope of Google-Extended.
- → Search Engine Land : coverage of the case and recap of the 2021 and 2024 fines, 11 August 2026.
Growth and SEO & GEO content strategist, I founded Cicéro to help businesses build lasting organic visibility — on Google and in AI-generated answers alike. Every piece of content we produce is designed to convert, not just to exist.
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