Google will not pay press publishers in France to display their content and will instead change the way articles appear in search results, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

The announcement pours cold water on publishers' hopes of obtaining more money from the tech giant for displaying their content under the European Union's new copyright regime, which France was the first to transpose into national law.

"We don’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results. We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked. That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result," Richard Gingras, vice president for news at Google, said in a blogpost.