Google's AI Opt-Out Setting May Cost Publishers Top Stories

The Carousel Moved Inside the AI Overview

Google has been showing the Top Stories carousel inside AI Overviews instead of running it as its own module further down the page, according to tracking data published by NewzDash, a visibility platform sold to news publishers. That shift matters right now because Google's new AI opt-out setting in Search Console covers AI Overviews, and a publisher who flips that switch may be walking away from the carousel spot without realizing it.

Entertainment queries ran highest for this placement in both countries. NewzDash's report does not disclose sample size, total query volume, or the date range of the data, so treat the percentages as directional rather than a full census of search behavior. What the firm is confident about is the structure: the carousel and the standalone module never showed up together. It is one placement replacing the other, not an addition to it.

Why the Opt-Out Setting Is the Real Story

Google's Search Console control for opting out of AI features covers AI Overviews, and the company says it started factoring the setting in on June 17. The rollout began with a subset of U.K. site owners and is expanding to "a subset of website owners" per Google's help page, the same vague scoping language marketers have gotten used to from Google's claims about billions of weekly AI search clicks without underlying data to back it.

NewzDash's Shehata reads the mechanics plainly: the carousel is a set of publisher links displayed inside a feature the opt-out setting covers, so a site that opts out should lose that carousel slot along with everything else AI Overviews touches. He calls this a high-confidence read, not a proven outcome, and says NewzDash plans to test it directly. Google's help page states that an opted-out site's links and content will not appear in covered features while other sites' content still can, but the page describes the rule at the feature level and never addresses sub-placements like the carousel by name.

What Remains Unconfirmed

Google has not said either way whether opting out removes a site from the carousel specifically, and publishers should not treat Shehata's reading as settled. It sits alongside other crawl and indexing quirks marketers have had to puzzle out on faith, including how Google may ignore robots.txt under certain file errors, another case where Google's public documentation trails the actual mechanics.