A coalition of independent publishers is urging the UK's Competition and Markets Authority to rethink its approach to Google's AI Overviews, arguing the regulator's new conduct requirements leave a fundamental competition problem unresolved.
The letter, sent on 10 July by law firm Preiskel & Co, was submitted on behalf of the Independent Media Association, the Independent Publishers Alliance, Impress Media and the Movement for an Open Web to the CMA's Search SMS case team. . It follows Movement for an Open Web's earlier complaint to the regulator and comes alongside the European Commission's separate investigation into AI Overviews under Article 102.
The CMA's conduct requirements, issued under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, allow publishers to opt out of having their content used to train or ground Google's AI Overviews. The letter, however, argues the measures apply only to publishers' content and do not alter the presentation of AI Overviews in search results. As a result, it says, publishers who opt out may still have an AI Overview displayed above their listing, generated from other publishers' content.
Beyond this specific case, the dispute raises a broader question about whether competition law is equipped to address market failures that affect both sides of a two-sided market. It is also particularly important for independent publishers who have the least capacity to absorb the traffic collapse AI Overviews have already been shown to cause, and for whom opting out of AI while staying visible in search may not be a viable option.
User choice and publisher rights
The letter also identifies similar concerns across the conduct requirements. It distinguishes between the Publisher Conduct Requirement, which covers what Google can do with a publisher's content, and the User Choice Conduct Requirement, which currently applies only to choice screens for search rather than to AI Overviews specifically. Without a consumer-facing option to disable AI Overviews, the letter argues, the publisher opt-out does not restore competition, since Google remains the only provider of an AI Overview in the results and users have no way to turn it off.
The debate over AI Overviews' classification
At the heart of the dispute is how the CMA has classified AI Overviews. As currently formulated, the regulator's conduct requirements treat them as a feature of Google's general search service. The publishers, however, argue they should instead be regarded as a separate product bundled with search. To support that argument, the letter points to Google's own submission to the CMA, in which the company described its Gemini assistant as serving "a distinct end user demand" centred on content generation rather than information retrieval. It also cites a ruling by a German regional court which, the letter says, found Google liable for AI Overview content on the basis that the AI-generated summaries function as a publication rather than a search feature.
The letter also links its bundling argument to Google's commercial relationship with Apple. It cites the Information Services Agreement between the two companies, under which the CMA's own Mobile Browsers and Cloud Gaming Final Report from March 2025 recorded that Apple receives 36% of Google's advertising revenue from Safari search traffic. It also refers to Apple's January 2026 announcement that future Apple Foundation Models will be built on Google's Gemini models, arguing that the revenue-sharing arrangement and the AI partnership together give the two companies a shared interest in the data generated by search traffic on Apple devices, which is an interest not available to competing AI developers.
Objections to the Fair Ranking requirement
The letter's central objection is to the Fair Ranking Conduct Requirement, published in final form on 17 June 2026. It argues the CR addresses ranking within organic search results and separately within AI-generated content, but does not address the position of the AI Overview relative to organic results as a whole. Under this reading, a publisher that opts out of having its content used in AI Overviews can still be displaced in the results by an AI Overview built from other publishers' content, because the CR does not regulate where the AI Overview itself sits on the page.
What the publishers are asking for
On the strength of this, the letter asks the CMA to require Google to unbundle AI Overviews from general search while the conduct requirements are implemented, and to ensure Google does not downrank rival publishers' content relative to its own; to amend the User Choice Conduct Requirement so users can choose whether AI Overviews appear in search results; to open an investigation under Chapter II of the Competition Act 1998 into Google's conduct, alongside the DMCCA conduct requirements, on the grounds that this would let publishers seek redress for past harm in a way the letter says the DMCCA framework does not; and to pause implementation of the Fair Ranking, User Choice and Publisher conduct requirements until they can be considered together by the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
The letter also notes that under section 103 of the DMCCA, a party with "a sufficient interest" may apply to the Competition Appeal Tribunal for review of a CMA decision within six weeks of being notified of it, or of the decision's publication, whichever is earlier. The CMA has not yet issued a public response.