Weekly Search News: Google Defends AI Click Volume While Publishers Consider Blocking Search

This week's search news roundup from SERoundtable spans regulatory pressure, publisher relations, and Google's product roadmap. Google stated it sends billions of clicks to websites weekly through AI Search features, even as large publishers grow fed up and consider blocking Google Search entirely. The European Commission fined Google €1 billion for anti-competitive conduct in search and app distribution under DMA rules; separately, Google's lawsuit against SerpApi over search result scraping was dismissed. On the earnings front, Google reported $120 billion in quarterly revenue with search revenue up 17% and ad revenue climbing 14.5%. Search ranking volatility spiked mid-week, Google rolled out Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite to its search engine, and the company made numerous incremental changes to ads appeals, hotel search, Local Services Ads, and AdSense formats alongside fresh crawl budget guidance.