Publishers now have an opt-out sitting in front of them that almost none have flipped. The spreadsheet in the next tab cannot tell them what happens if they do.
The hesitation comes from a measurement problem, not caution for its own sake. Testing this switch requires the comparison no publisher can run: the same pages, in the same week, with and without inclusion in AI summaries. What you get instead is a before and an after, laid over a news cycle, a seasonal curve and whatever Google shipped that month. By the questionnaire's August 28 deadline, the control had existed for at most 88 days [14], which is not long enough to separate its effect from everything else moving at once.
Teams often assume publishers will treat an opt-out as leverage, switching it back if traffic drops. In practice, when a setting's effect cannot be attributed, publishers tend to leave it alone. Google's framing is that ordinary rankings are unaffected [1]. The exposure publishers describe sits above the blue links rather than inside them, in the block readers now see first [16].
The numbers show what is at stake. Publishers have reported click declines of up to 58% [5]. Of every 100 clicks a story used to earn, 42 remain [13]. What the Commission's form is really asking is whether flipping the switch protects those 42 or takes another bite out of them, and nobody filling it in has the data to answer.
The May merge matters more than the phrasing suggests. Folding AI Overviews and AI Mode into one AI Search experience leaves fewer distinct parts of the page a publisher can join or avoid [3]. One label covering two surfaces is a coarser control than two labels, even when the wording on the settings screen stays the same.
Google controls the interface, the ranking system and the AI features inside it, which means it sets both the options and the cost of taking them [6]. That asymmetry explains why some publishers have gone past withdrawal and asked to be paid instead [12], why French media organisations took the payment question to their competition authority [9], and why a German court has already found Google liable over AI Overviews [10]. The concession pattern is legible enough: the opt-out arrived the day the UK ordered one [4], Google has since agreed to suspend manual spam demotions across the European Economic Area to head off a separate Digital Markets Act case [8], and all of it sits against more than 10 billion euros in EU antitrust fines accumulated over almost two decades [7]. Brussels, meanwhile, is still deciding whether the existing framework requires a more formal intervention [11].
As shipped, the opt-out is usable by publishers whose demand does not arrive through search, which are the publishers least exposed to the summaries to begin with. For everyone else, a control is distinguishable from a preference by two things you should be able to state before touching it: the number that would make you revert, and the window in which you would read that number. Publishers who can state neither are guessing rather than choosing, and writing that down on the Commission's form is worth more than a confident answer nobody can support.
