An update on web publisher controls

Over the years advances in AI have enhanced our products, benefiting the people who use them, web content creators, and the overall web ecosystem. The rapid growth and development of generative AI tools is helping web publishers connect with their audiences more easily and creatively than ever before. We're committed to developing AI responsibly, guided by our AI principles and in line with our consumer privacy commitment. However, we've also heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases.

Today we’re announcing Google-Extended, a new control that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products. By using Google-Extended to control access to content on a site, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time.

Making simple and scalable controls, like Google-Extended, available through robots.txt is an important step in providing transparency and control that we believe all providers of AI models should make available. However, as AI applications expand, web publishers will face the increasing complexity of managing different uses at scale. That's why we're committed to engaging with the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable approaches to choice and control for web publishers. We look forward to sharing more soon.