Could Choosing AI Opt-Out Banish Your Site from Google’s Coveted Top Stories?

Ever noticed how Google loves to shuffle its deck when it comes to news placement? Well, here’s a curveball: instead of letting the Top Stories carousel chill out lower on the page, Google’s been sneaking it inside AI Overviews. Yep, that slick little carousel now cozies up within AI-powered summaries, at least according to some solid tracking from NewzDash. But here’s the kicker — this move might just have publishers scratching their heads, especially with Google’s fresh opt-out settings now thrown into the mix. Are newsrooms prepared to trade off their headline spotlight for a stance against AI? It’s a game of visibility roulette, where the stakes are headlines and click-throughs you can’t quite measure yet. Curious how this backstage play unfolds and what it all means for publishers tangled in Google’s AI web? Dive deeper with the full lowdown right here. LEARN MORE.

Google has been putting the Top Stories carousel inside AI Overviews rather than showing it lower down the page as its own module, according to tracking data published by NewzDash, a firm that sells visibility tracking to news publishers.

Among the news searches the company tracked where Google showed Top Stories at all, 15.5% in the U.S. and 17.46% in the U.K. had the carousel inside the AI Overview. Entertainment ran highest in both countries. The report does not say how big the sample was, how many searches it covers, or when the data is from.

It is one placement rather than two. The two never appeared together in the results NewzDash tracked. Founder and CEO John Shehata, who wrote the report, calls it a better spot on the page. No data yet compares clicks on the two versions.

Google’s new opt-out setting now has a news placement riding on it.

Where Google’s AI Opt-Out Comes In

Google’s Search Console control for opting out of AI features covers AI Overviews, and Google says it began taking the setting into account on June 17. Google launched the test with a subset of UK site owners, and its help page now says the control is rolling out to a subset of website owners.

Shehata reads it that a publisher who opts out would drop out of a Top Stories carousel inside an AI Overview, because the carousel is a set of publisher links shown inside one of the features the setting covers. He calls that a high-confidence read rather than a proven result, and says NewzDash plans to test it.

Google has not said either way. Its help page says the links and content of a site that opts out will not appear in the covered features, and that content from other sites will still be available there. Google writes the rule for the whole feature, not for the parts inside it, so it never says what happens to the carousel.

Google-Extended Is Not A Search Opt-Out

Shehata writes that publishers are mixing up two controls. Google’s crawler page says Google-Extended controls whether crawled content trains future Gemini models and helps ground answers in Gemini Apps and through Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. The same page says it does not affect whether a site is in Google Search. Blocking it, by itself, does not keep a publisher out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, or either Top Stories placement.

Why This Matters

Until now the opt-out question has been about content, and whether Google gets to use a newsroom’s work to answer something a reader would have clicked through for. NewzDash’s data puts the headlines themselves on the same switch. When the carousel turns up inside the AI Overview, the feature a publisher opts out of is also the place that publisher’s headline sits.

That changes what the choice costs without making the cost easy to see. Google writes the setting for the whole feature and has not said what happens to a carousel inside one. A newsroom deciding this week is weighing a firm objection to AI summaries against an unknown amount of lost news visibility.

Looking Ahead

Google says it expects to add to the list of features the setting covers as it builds out Search, so the three named today may not be the whole list later. So the setting covers more ground over time, not less. For now it only matters to the subset of sites that have it.

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