The Trigger Decision: When the Overview Appears, When It Does Not — A Gate-Stack Model of AI Overview Rendering and the Settlement Signal It Emits (EA-AIO-TRIGGER-01 v1.0)

The model has one dial and four gates.

• Gate 0 — administrative dial: controls aggregate prevalence.
• Gate 1 — utility classifier: asks whether synthesis serves the query better than links or other interfaces.
• Gate 2 — confidence gate: asks whether the source field supports a high-confidence summary.
• Gate 3 — policy patch: applies topic or literal-string suppressions.
• Gate 4 — latency/cache economics: prices generation cost and demand.

The proposed Consent Transfer Principle distinguishes:

• AI Overview as unrequested push synthesis;
• AI Mode as requested pull synthesis.

Because the user explicitly requests AI Mode, the paper hypothesizes lower rendering thresholds and wider source pools.

The render-decision-as-signal claim treats absence as one branch of a selection function rather than mere failure.

The Settlement Lag measures the interval between:

• first stable authored rendering in AI Mode;
• first equivalent rendering in AI Overview.

The protocol requires multiple same-day samples, fixed query classes, session/device/login recording, surface separation, and independent tracking of render presence versus citation composition.