The U.K.’s top anticompetition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), issued a critical ruling against Google on Wednesday, calling for the search giant to provide content creators with more agency over how their content is used by the company’s AI tools.
The proposal deals with a concern that arose when Google first introduced its AI Overviews, which use content pulled from publisher websites to answer user queries on the search page, reducing users’ need to visit the websites themselves.
The new ruling calls for Google to allow publishers to opt-out of AI Overview feature without harming their visibility on search.
This dynamic, colloquially known as Google Zero, has become an existential issue for publishers, which rely on search traffic to generate advertising revenue. The same issue holds with Gemini, which also ingests publishers’ data to answer user queries without sending those users to the original sources of that information. According to data from Chartbeat, search traffic to publishers declined globally by a third in 2025.
In response to the issue, publishers have sought to block the Google crawlers that pull information from their sites and feed it to Gemini and AI Overviews. But Google uses the same indexing system for Gemini and AI Overviews as it does for its search engine, meaning if publishers blocked the crawler, they would also risk losing search visibility.
Publisher advocates and critics of the set-up have called on Google to split its lone crawler into two, allowing publishers to block scraping for Gemini and AIOs while still allowing the company to crawl and index sites for search.
Google has resisted those efforts, but the CMA finding may now force its hand.
Two key caveats
While the proposal is a welcome ruling for publishers, it is hardly a windfall.
