Will tech giants ever let us opt out of AI search features?

The internet is moving from being search-driven to answer-driven. In the current era of AI-powered search, publishers are watching while their content is scraped and paraphrased by large language models, users hold concerns about not being able to easily opt out of AI features on large platforms, and a couple of Big Tech companies stand to benefit the most from this new paradigm. A common search on Google means coming face-to-face with its AI Overviews, which populate the top of the search page with a summary of key information about the topic searched and links to where the answers came from. A year after the initial launch of AI Overviews in May 2024, Google said the feature drove a 10%-plus increase in usage of the search engine in its biggest markets, like the U.S. and India, for queries that show AI Overviews. This is good news for the company. Google claims that thanks to its generative AI features, people are more satisfied with search and using it more often. Along with fellow tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta Platforms, the company has spent the past few years since the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT aggressively embedding artificial intelligence features across most of its services. However, these same platforms have faced criticism from users and industry peers alike for what many say has felt like a heavy-handed approach. “Forcing a publisher to consent or forcing a user to consent was not how we wanted to implement AI,” says Kamyl Bazbaz, chief communications and policy officer for DuckDuckGo, one of Google’s biggest search competitors, which stands apart from many of today’s tech platforms by offering an AI-free version. In May, a week after Google announced an upgrade to its search with Gemini 3.5 Flash, DuckDuckGo received an increase in U.S. installs by 30% week over week. Bazbaz says DuckDuckGo’s install levels are still about 30% above where they were before Google’s announcement. “Some folks sort of thought, This is enou