UK May Force Google to Allow Sites to Opt Out of AI-Powered Search Summaries

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Jan. 28 said Google should give news sites and creators control over whether they allow their content to be scraped to feed its AI Overview feature, under proposals the competition watchdog is considering.

The CMA said the measures could allow publishers to “opt out of their content being used to power artificial intelligence (AI) features such as AI Overview or to train AI models outside of Google search.”

AI Overview generates a topic summary when a user types a query into the search engine; it appears above the relevant results.

“Google will also be required to take practical steps to ensure publisher content is properly attributed in AI results,” the CMA said in a statement.

The measure is part of a range of proposals being considered by the CMA.

Other proposals include that Google will ensure that its search engine ranking approach is “fair and transparent for businesses.” The company would be required to demonstrate to its users and the CMA that rank search results are fair, including in AI Overview and AI Mode.

CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said these “targeted and proportionate actions would give UK businesses and consumers more choice and control over how they interact with Google’s search services.”

“They would also provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organisations, over how their content is used in Google’s AI Overviews,” she said.

The watchdog will make its final decision on what conduct requirements to impose after considering feedback from a consultation that closes on Feb. 25.

User Behavior Shifting

According to web traffic analysis website StatCounter, Google accounts for 90.8 percent of the search engine market share worldwide and 92.3 percent in the UK.

In response to potential new requirements, Google’s principal product manager, Ron Eden, wrote in a blog post that user behavior is shifting and that features such as AI Overview are helping people discover more content.

Eden said that Google has provided web publishers with a range of controls to manage how their content appears in searches and has recently introduced Google Extended, which lets websites manage how their published content is used to train its AI model, Gemini.

“Building on this framework, and working with the web ecosystem, we’re now exploring updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt out of Search generative AI features,” Eden wrote.

“Our goal is to protect the helpfulness of Search for people who want information quickly, while also giving websites the right tools to manage their content.”

Eden said Google looks forward to engaging with the CMA in the watchdog’s process “and will continue discussions with website owners and other stakeholders on this topic.”

The proposals come after the CMA designated Google in October 2025 with “strategic market status” in search and search advertising services. This allows the watchdog to introduce targeted rules on businesses to ensure fair dealing and services are open to effective competition.

The watchdog notes that the strategic market status “does not imply that [Google] has acted anti-competitively.”