Explainer
July 29, 2026
Search for something today, and Google will often answer before anyone else can: an AI-generated paragraph at the top of the page. You skim it, you’re satisfied, you close the tab. The news site that did the reporting and wrote the piece never sees you arrive.Now regulators are pushing back. In June, following a legal complaint by a coalition including tech justice group Foxglove, an Open Society Foundations grantee, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a landmark ruling that puts important new limits on Google’s AI Overviews.We spoke with Foxglove’s co-executive director Martha Dark to help explain what the ruling does, and what it doesn’t.What are AI Overviews, and why are publishers furious?These are the AI-generated summaries that now sit above your search results. They compress material from across the web, much of it produced by news outlets. Publishers say they’re cutting off the traffic that they depend on to survive.Launched in the U.S. in 2024, the feature is now available in more than 200 countries and uses over 40 languages. Google claims that AI Overviews “make it easy to ask new kinds of questions, quickly find information, and explore relevant sites across the web.”Publishers see it differently. For years, the arrangement was simple: they let Google list their content within search results and Google sent them readers—and the ad revenue that came with them. AI Overviews upended that.Research commissioned for Foxglove’s campaign found that when an AI Overview appears, the top-ranked site beneath it can lose as much as 79 percent of its traffic for that search. That’s not an accident. “Google’s intention was to keep people on their page and maximize their revenue,” says Dark. “This has meant a death blow for some news outlets.”What did the UK regulator actually do? It gave publishers a real choice for the first time: stay visible on Google without feeding its AI.Previously, any publisher that opted out of its work being used by AI Overviews would be removed from Google’s search index entirely. Given that Google controls 90 percent of search volume, removal would mean that “you effectively don’t exist on the internet,” Dark says.Acting on the complaint brought by Foxglove alongside the Independent Publisher Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web, the CMA imposed new requirements on Google—the first of their kind anywhere in the world. Publishers can now opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews and other AI search features without affecting their ranking in ordinary search results.The regulator also now requires Google to correctly attribute the content its AI summaries draw upon and link back to publishers’ websites.Does this ruling have teeth?Yes, but the bite could be sharper.The UK regulator has given Google nine months to implement the ruling, and will require the company to submit regular compliance reports thereafter. However, the CMA dropped a proposal to have an independent auditor produce the first report. Foxglove warns this could allow Google to “mark its own homework.”Google has signaled cooperation, saying in a blog post that it supports “fairness and promoting publisher choice and control” and that it was “beginning to test a new control that lets website owners manage how their links and content appear in generative AI Search features.”Could this spread to other countries?It already is.Last year, after an inquiry by South Africa’s competition regulator found that Google had profited from using local news content without adequate compensation, Google agreed to provide around $40 million to support the country’s media platforms. Brazil’s antitrust and competition authority Administrative Council for Economic Defense is currently probing whether Google’s AI Overviews pose a risk to journalistic diversity. In December, the European Commission opened an investigation into whether Google is using publishers’ content to power its AI products without compensation. If found in breach, Google could be fined as much as 10 percent of its global revenue.Even large fines may not dent Google’s profits much: “Google is more powerful than many individual countries, and no individual news outlet acting alone can change how it acts,” says Dark. That’s why Foxglove is hoping regulators across the globe can act in unison to force the company to change its behavior. Foxglove is currently talking with its partners in sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia—both massive markets for Google—and weighing litigation against Google in Germany.“This isn’t an issue that impacts just one jurisdiction; it impacts everyone, so we need to try to encourage civil society, publishers, regulators to act together as a bloc,” says Dark. “We need to move quickly—this is already affecting the bottom line of publishers in a significant way.”Can anyone really rein in Google’s power?Yes, argues Foxglove—if regulators and courts do more of what the UK just did.In the U.S., Google has been fighting one of the biggest antitrust cases in its history. A 2024 ruling by a federal judge found the firm was operating an illegal monopoly to become the world’s biggest search engine, a finding Google is appealing.Dark says the onus shouldn’t be on individual users or publishers to stop using Google. “We shouldn’t have to choose between a bad service or no service,” she says. “Firms like Google should be forced by courts and regulators to provide a service which works for communities and isn’t exploitative. We should be able to use Google and demand better from them.”
