In October 2025, the Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA) categorized Google search and search promoting with strategic market standing (SMS), a designation that allows it to think about proportionate, focused interventions to make sure that normal search companies are open to efficient competitors.
Following a session on potential digital market equity measures launched in January 2026, the CMA has now launched conduct necessities to offer publishers extra management and stronger bargaining energy over using their content material.
This contains requiring Google to supply “efficient instruments” that permit publishers to stop their content material getting used within the firm’s AI options, and permitting publishers to decide out of permitting their content material for use for the “fine-tuning” of AI fashions.
Google should now make sure that writer content material is correctly attributed, with clear hyperlinks displayed in AI‑generated search outcomes. The measures comply with complaints from media and civil society organisations that publishers have skilled a drop in click-through site visitors to their websites since Google began putting AI-generated summaries on the high of search outcomes. Till now, web sites have been unable to decide out of their content material being scraped for AI overviews with out additionally withdrawing from showing in conventional Google search outcomes.
“At present, we’ve launched a world‑first requirement on Google’s search companies within the UK, enabling truthful therapy, larger transparency and significant selection for companies and shoppers,” stated CMA chief govt Sarah Cardell.
“With options like AI Overviews quickly reshaping on-line search, it’s essential that content material publishers, together with information organisations, have acceptable bargaining energy over how their content material is used. On the similar time, these measures will assist tens of thousands and thousands of UK search customers higher perceive and belief the knowledge offered to them.”
The watchdog added whereas these new necessities are anticipated to “put publishers, like information organisations, in a stronger place to barter content material offers with Google”, it would take an “lively function” in overseeing how Google implements the measures.
“[Google] can have 9 months to implement all modifications however the CMA expects necessary elements of the controls to grow to be obtainable to publishers nicely earlier than that deadline,” stated the CMA in a blogpost asserting the measures.
“Google may also be required to submit and publish compliance stories, supported by key knowledge and metrics, explaining modifications it has made and the way it has complied. These are due each six months for the primary yr, after which the CMA will assessment the frequency of reporting.”
Google has stated it will begin testing a brand new management from Wednesday on a subset of UK-based media websites, permitting homeowners to handle how their hyperlinks and content material seem in its AI search options, with the goal of rolling the controls out globally.
A examine by search engine optimisation platform Authoritas from July 2025 beforehand discovered {that a} web site ranked first in a search outcome might lose round 79% of its site visitors if it was listed under an AI overview.
Nonetheless, a Google spokesperson on the time stated in a press release that the examine was “inaccurate and based mostly on flawed assumptions and evaluation”, utilizing outdated estimations and a set of searches that didn’t signify all of the queries that might generate site visitors for information web sites.
An extra examine run by the Pew Analysis Middle additionally confirmed an enormous hit to referral site visitors from Google AI Overviews, with a month-long survey of virtually 69,000 Google searches revealing that customers solely clicked a hyperlink underneath an AI abstract as soon as each 100 occasions.
A Google spokesperson stated that examine additionally used “flawed methodology and skewed queryset that isn’t consultant of search site visitors”.
In a blogpost revealed on 3 June 2026, Google stated it was partaking with regulators such because the CMA “to make sure web site homeowners have the precise instruments as person preferences evolve”.
Weblog creator Mrinalini Loew, the final supervisor at Google Search Ecosystem, added the corporate will start testing a brand new instrument permitting web site homeowners to handle how their hyperlinks and content material seem in its AI search options, similar to AI overviews and AI mode.
“We’re starting to roll these options out to a subset of web site homeowners within the UK, permitting for thorough testing earlier than rolling them out to web site homeowners globally,” she stated, including that the controls won’t be used as a rating sign for search outcomes exterior the generative AI search options.
Responding to the CMA announcement, tech-focused civil society group Foxglove stated though it welcomes the regulator new measures, it’s involved that implementation must be quicker to finish ongoing injury to the information business. It added additional motion could also be wanted to make sure efficient scrutiny of Google’s compliance.
“We’re delighted that the CMA is lastly standing as much as Google’s theft of journalists’ work,” stated Foxglove’s co-executive director Rosa Curling, who added the group has been urging them to do that for the previous yr.
“Google’s AI Overviews are a menace not solely to an impartial information business, however to an knowledgeable democracy. Google’s AI Overviews don’t solely take others’ work with out fee. Additionally they make it tougher for journalists to immediately attain their viewers – threatening their survival. With out impartial journalism, it turns into far tougher to carry highly effective governments and companies to account.
“Till now, the one technique to cease Google stealing your work was to decide out from being seen in any respect in Google search. With Google controlling 90% of search, this was akin to eradicating your self from the web.”
She added that there are issues that Google should still have the ability to “wriggle out” of the obligations imposed by the CMA: “The measures would permit it to mark its personal homework, slightly than being topic to rigorous, impartial audit. The timeframe is just too beneficiant – there isn’t a motive to offer Google 9 months to place a cease to the horrible hurt it’s inflicting – which it has, itself, been conscious of for years.
“The CMA should watch Google like a hawk – each to make sure compliance with these measures, and to behave urgently on any hurt ensuing from its new proposals round new AI options and brokers in search.”
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