AI Opt-Out May Cost Sites A Google Top Stories Spot

Search Engine Journal reports on NewzDash tracking data showing Google has started embedding the Top Stories carousel inside AI Overviews rather than displaying it as a separate module on the page. The concern: publishers who use Google’s new Search Console opt-out for AI features may inadvertently lose their Top Stories visibility in the process.

What’s actually new

NewzDash found that among news searches where Top Stories appeared, 15.5% in the U.S. and 17.46% in the U.K. had the carousel nested inside the AI Overview. The two placements — standalone carousel and in-AI-Overview carousel — never appeared together in the same results. NewzDash CEO John Shehata characterizes this as a better spot on the page, though no click-through comparison data exists yet. The report notably doesn’t disclose sample size, query volume, or the date range of the data.

Separately, Google’s Search Console opt-out control for AI features began taking effect on June 17, initially rolling out to a subset of UK site owners and now expanding. Shehata’s read — which he labels high-confidence but unproven — is that opting out would remove a publisher from any Top Stories carousel that lives inside an AI Overview, since the opt-out covers the entire feature. Google hasn’t confirmed or denied this interpretation.

One important clarification from the article: Google-Extended in robots.txt is not the same thing as the Search Console AI opt-out. Google-Extended controls whether crawled content trains Gemini models and grounds answers in Gemini Apps. It does not affect whether a site appears in Google Search, AI Overviews, or Top Stories.

What it means for your config

This is a robots.txt and Search Console settings concern, not a build-tooling config change. But for anyone managing site-level crawler directives, the distinction between Google-Extended and the Search Console AI opt-out is the thing to get right. Blocking Google-Extended in your robots.txt does not opt you out of AI Overviews or AI Mode — it only controls Gemini training and grounding. The AI feature opt-out is a separate Search Console toggle, currently available only to a subset of site owners.

Google has said the list of features covered by the opt-out will grow over time. There’s no documented way to opt out of AI Overviews while retaining carousel placement inside them — the setting is all-or-nothing at the feature level. If you’re a publisher weighing this, the honest answer is that the cost of opting out is still ambiguous. Google hasn’t specified carousel behavior, and NewzDash hasn’t tested it yet.

Recommended next step

If you manage crawler config for a news site, audit whether you’re conflating Google-Extended with the Search Console AI opt-out — they control different things. Before toggling the Search Console setting, read the original article for Shehata’s full reasoning on the Top Stories implications, and watch for NewzDash’s planned follow-up test. Until Google documents carousel behavior explicitly, any opt-out decision is being made with incomplete information.

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Read the full announcement on Search Engine Journal → AI Opt-Out May Cost Sites A Google Top Stories Spot