UK Regulator Staunches Google’s AI Content Grab

Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is a journalist, scholar and human rights advocate who currently directs the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute and is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She serves on the board of Tech Policy Press.

On Wednesday, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a binding conduct requirement forcing Google to give publishers real control over whether their content powers AI-generated search summaries. Under the new rules, publishers can opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and broader generative AI services at both directory and page level. Google must also attribute publisher content with clear links in AI-generated results and submit compliance reports every six months. And critically, the CMA adopted one of the key provisions the center I run has been advocating for—a No Retaliation rule, meaning that Google cannot downrank or penalize publishers in general search results for opting out of the AI features.

These requirements, though they will not be mandated for implementation immediately, are already having ramifications for publishers around the world. Google has indicated it will begin testing new controls for a subset of website owners before a global rollout—which means today’s decision has implications for publishers everywhere.

Our Center for Media and Digital Governance was at the forefront of urging the CMA to make publisher remedies an early enforcement priority, not something deferred to a later phase when AI markets will have consolidated further around business models built on the uncompensated extraction of journalistic value. And apparently that argument landed, because publisher protections are among the first conduct requirements being imposed rather than being relegated to a later stage or an afterthought. As I said in our statement, “For too long, dominant digital platforms have been permitted to extract value from journalism while weakening the economic foundations of the organizations that produce it.”

The CMA acted under the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which designated Google with strategic market status in October 2025, recognizing that it controls over 90% of UK general search queries and other market dynamics that we highlighted in our submission to the consultation. The publisher conduct requirement is the first such requirement imposed on Google, and CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell was explicit that more is coming (hopefully—the CMA has the opportunity to adopt bold solutions).

One of the core underlying problems is one we have been documenting for years and is tied to Google’s illegal (in the US at least) monopoly of search and ability to tie this dominance to other products like AI: publishers must allow Google’s crawler to access their content to appear in search results. That same crawled content now powers AI Overviews that reduce traffic back to those publishers—what the CMA aptly calls compelled consent. When AI Overviews appear in a search, the click-through rates plummet, making it impossible to duel digital advertising, monetize audiences through subscriptions or memberships, or cultivate brand awareness, undermining the economic rationale for producing the content Google’s AI depends on.

The timeline is problematic, however, since the main obligations come into force December 3, 2026, with nine months after that for Google to implement. Compliance reports are supposed to land every six months, meaning we may not know whether any of this is working until late 2027. Publishers absorbing losses right now cannot wait that long for evidence that a remedy is functioning. As my CMDG colleague Karina Montoya noted, “meaningful protections will require regulators to ensure these requirements produce real-world outcomes, not merely procedural compliance.”

Today’s announcement builds on a unanimous vote by Brazil’s competition authority in April to deepen its investigation into Google’s use of journalistic content in Search and Google News rather than accept a recommendation to close the case. CMDG had urged CADE to reopen the inquiry in a submission last November, alongside allies in the CTRL+J alliance, drawing on evidence from publishers around the world. The authorities recognized that AI Overviews had transformed what was originally a snippets dispute into something considerably more serious, and sent the case back for formal administrative proceedings with expanded scope. The fact that civil society engaged in the process in writing, in person, and across jurisdictions is what is moving these proceedings forward and securing our ability to push back against Google’s dominance.

These developments, alongside similar inquiries in Europe and other jurisdictions, indicate a converging international acknowledgment that Google’s dominance in search and its integration of generative AI cannot be treated as separate from each other, much less separate from the crisis facing journalism and the information ecosystem more broadly. The individuals and organizations producing the information on which AI systems rely cannot be an afterthought in the governance of digital markets.

Independent journalism is essential public infrastructure. If AI systems derive value from news content, the organizations that invest in reporting, fact-finding, and accountability journalism must have meaningful leverage in determining the terms of that relationship. Today is a first step toward that, though the measure of its success will be its enforcement.