Britain’s competition regulator has stopped consulting and started ordering. On Wednesday the Competition and Markets Authority imposed new conduct requirements on Google’s search services, the first concrete obligations to follow from its decision to designate the company as holding strategic market status.
Among them is a provision with sharp implications for the AI era: publishers will be able to opt out of having their content train Google’s AI models.
Google’s search results increasingly summarise the web rather than send users to it, and those summaries are built on content the company crawls for ranking. Publishers have argued they face a trap: refuse the crawl and vanish from search, allow it and feed the AI systems that reduce their traffic. The CMA’s rule is meant to break that bind by separating the two, letting a site appear in search without consenting to AI training.
The rest of the package is structural. The CMA’s requirements mandate fair ranking, transparency, proper content attribution, and default choice screens on Android and Chrome so users can pick rival search services rather than accept Google’s by default. Choice screens are familiar from a decade of EU antitrust enforcement; their inclusion here signals the CMA intends to use the practical levers that have moved the needle elsewhere.
