The UK's Competition and Markets Authority imposed two new conduct requirements on Google on 17 June 2026, mandating greater transparency over how its organic search rankings work — including AI Overviews — and establishing clearer complaint processes for businesses affected by those rankings.

The requirements flow from the CMA's designation of Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search services, first proposed in June 2025. SMS is the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2022 mechanism for subjecting firms with "substantial and entrenched market power" in a strategic digital market to bespoke, binding conduct requirements — a framework that sits closer to ex ante regulation than traditional competition enforcement. Designation gives the CMA powers to impose requirements without having to prove an infringement, which shortens the enforcement timeline considerably.

The two requirements confirmed on 17 June address distinct but related problems. The first — the fair ranking conduct requirement — obliges Google to rank organic search results using objective criteria and to be transparent about how that ranking works, explicitly covering AI-powered features such as AI Overviews. The second formalises complaint channels, giving publishers and commercial operators a defined route to raise concerns about their treatment in search without having to trigger a full regulatory investigation.

Publisher Controls and AI Transparency

Alongside the new conduct requirements, the CMA has consulted on publisher-specific obligations that would require Google to give content providers effective transparency, attribution, and choice over how their material is collected and used for search — including disaggregated performance data relating to AI services, according to CMA documentation published in June 2025. This is the more structurally significant thread. The practical concern is that as AI Overviews and similar features absorb more of the answer-layer in search, publishers lose visibility into whether their content is being surfaced, credited, or consumed at all. Disaggregated data would let them distinguish traffic and attribution effects from Google's web index versus its AI features — a distinction that is currently opaque.

That opacity matters commercially. Publishers who cannot measure how their content performs in AI-driven results cannot make rational decisions about whether to allow indexing, negotiate licensing terms, or invest in SEO. The CMA's proposed attribution and choice controls would give them a lever they currently lack.

What the Fair Ranking Requirement Actually Demands

The fair ranking requirement is narrower than it might appear. It does not dictate ranking outcomes or require Google to rank specific publishers higher. It requires that the criteria used to rank results be objective — meaning non-discriminatory and not self-preferencing — and that Google provide sufficient transparency for affected parties to understand how those criteria apply to their content, including within AI features.

Self-preferencing in search results has been a recurring concern across jurisdictions. The European Commission pursued Google over exactly this issue in the Google Shopping case, reaching its first decision in 2017 and ultimately sustaining the finding through years of appeals. The CMA's conduct requirement approach under the DMCCA is faster and more direct: rather than litigating a past infringement, it sets a forward-looking standard that Google must meet on an ongoing basis, with enforcement consequences if it does not.

AI Overviews complicate compliance in a specific way. Traditional blue-link search results have a relatively legible ranking signal structure; AI-generated summaries synthesise across multiple sources and may not surface individual URLs at all. Requiring transparency over "how it ranks organic search results, including AI features" will require Google to explain ranking logic that is, at least in part, generated by large language model inference rather than deterministic algorithmic signals. Whether the CMA's transparency standard can be met in that context — and how the watchdog will audit it — will be the harder operational question.

The broader picture here is that the CMA is now using the DMCCA's SMS architecture to move faster on AI-era search issues than it could under legacy competition law. The roadmap published alongside these requirements suggests further conduct requirements are in development. For Google, managing an increasingly granular regulatory compliance obligation across the UK, EU, and US simultaneously is itself a structural cost — one that smaller search entrants do not carry.