• The UK CMA issues its first binding conduct requirement on Google’s AI search features.
• Publishers can opt out of feeding Google AI Overviews.
• Deeper question of fair pay remains unanswered.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has issued its first binding Google AI search rules – and the regulator is already signalling it is not done. On 3 June 2026, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA ordered Google to give publishers real control over whether their content powers AI-generated search summaries. It did not frame this as a resolution. It called it a beginning.

The conduct requirement is specific. Under the new Google AI search regulation, publishers must be given controls to withhold their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and broader generative AI services, including Gemini and Vertex AI, at both the directory and page levels.

Google must also publish clear explanations of how crawled content is used, provide engagement metrics to publishers whose content appears in AI features, and ensure attribution includes links users can actually follow. The anti-retaliation clause is arguably the most important provision.

Google cannot penalise publishers who use these controls, for instance, by down-ranking their content in regular search results. Given the structural use Google holds over any publisher that depends on organic search traffic, that protection matters.

Google has nine months to implement the full set of changes, though the CMA expects meaningful controls to be available to publishers well before the deadline.

The problem these rules do not fix

The CMA is not wrong that publishers have been losing ground. Zero-click searches, where users find their answer on Google’s results page without ever clicking through, rose by close to 30% in categories like health and local news following the full UK rollout of AI Overviews in late 2025. Publishers supply the underlying information. Google captures the user. The content arrangement, as it stands, is not balanced.

What the order does not do is force Google to pay for that content. The CMA has said it will wait at least 12 months before deciding whether to require Google to negotiate fair licensing terms with publishers, a delay that drew immediate criticism from publisher trade bodies. The Professional Publishers Association, while supportive, made clear that opt-out controls alone do not recover lost traffic or revenue. Opting out of AI Overviews preserves a publisher’s content; it does not restore the commercial value already eroded by zero-click behaviour.

There is also an unresolved tension built into the opt-out logic. Publishers who withdraw their content from AI features protect their IP but risk reduced visibility as Google’s product becomes more AI-driven. Those who stay opted in continue feeding an AI system that, by the CMA’s own account, is reducing referral traffic without compensation. Neither path is straightforward.

The first requirement, not the last

What makes today’s announcement matter beyond its immediate provisions is what it signals. The CMA designated Google with market status in October 2025, recognising that Google controls over 90% of UK general search queries and holds structural power that traditional competition law cannot adequately address. The conduct requirement framework that flows from that designation lets the CMA impose binding, targeted rules without needing to prove Google acted illegally.

The publisher conduct requirement is, by the CMA’s own description in the formal legal notice, the first such requirement imposed on Google. CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell was direct: “We will be announcing further action in relation to Google’s search business in the coming weeks.”

Google’s public response has been measured. Mrinalini Loew, general manager at Google Search Ecosystem, said the company would begin testing new controls for a subset of UK website owners before a global rollout, describing it as part of ongoing dialogue with regulators.

What Google has not done is contest the CMA’s core premise, that the current relationship between its AI search features and the publishers powering them needs to change.

That is a meaningful concession, whatever its intent. The framework now exists, the regulator has used it once, and it has said clearly that it will use it again.

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