ivi-shell: setting surface visibility to 0 does not prevent the content from being rendered

I am implementing a custom controller for the ivi-shell together with a custom protocol. The protocol defines a request that a client can make to the controller to remove an ivi_surface from a certain output. The implementation of this request on the controller side, for the moment, just sets the visibility of the respective ivi_layout_surface to 0 and calls commit_changes. I was expecting that after that, the content of the surface is no longer visible on the screen, but it is.

Am I missing something?