The U.K.’s competition regulator said on Tuesday it is considering a new market designation for Google that would require the search giant to provide alternative search options to users, rank search results “more fairly,” and offer greater control to publishers over how their content is used in search and AI Overviews.
Under the new digital markets competition regime that went into force earlier this year, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it is launching a consultation on whether to designate Google with “strategic market status.”
Under that designation, which the CMA says is applicable to companies with a “sufficiently powerful position” in their market, Google would be forced to adhere to a slew of measures, including choice screens to let users decide and switch between search services (potentially including AI assistants); fair ranking principles for search results; better controls for publishers in how their content — collected for search — is used in Google’s AI services (including AI Overviews and Gemini AI Assistant); and ensuring people can transfer their data, such as their search history.
In a blog post about the consultation and proposed designation, CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell noted that U.K. businesses spent more than £33,000 per advertiser on Google search ads last year.
“Google search accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries in the UK, with millions of people relying on it as a key gateway to the internet […] If competition was working well, we would expect these costs to be lower,” wrote Cardell.
“These targeted and proportionate actions would give UK businesses and consumers more choice and control over how they interact with Google’s search services — as well as unlocking greater opportunities for innovation across the UK tech sector and broader economy,” Cardell said in a separate statement.
The CMA is currently collecting opinions on this designation and the proposed measures from industry stakeholders and will make a decision on the designation by October 13.
Google did not immediately return a request for comment.
