For 20 years, Google blocked other sites from embedding Google.com. Today it announced it will embed every publisher’s site into its own AI pages, ignoring the exact browser protections it helped build. (Thomas Baekdal, LinkedIn)
- Google's new "AI Mode in Chrome" embeds publisher websites inside its own AI interface, overriding X-Frame-Options and content-security-policy headers that explicitly instruct browsers not to allow this.
- Google has used these exact protections on its own domains since the early 2000s, blocking anyone from embedding Google.com in a frame. Publishers have no technical recourse.
- This is a useful concrete example of the gap between Google's stated respect for the open web and what it actually ships.
