The UK has restricted the operation of Google's AI service, AI Overviews

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has issued a strict regulatory ruling against Google. The agency has officially required the tech giant to implement effective tools that will allow news publishers and rights holders to fully control the use of their copyrighted content in the generative AI search engine AI Overviews. 

The UK antitrust regulator has officially designated Google as a company with “significant market power” in the online search sector. This legal status gives the government legal grounds to impose additional specific restrictions on the corporation.

 The main goal of the new rules is to protect traditional media from a sharp drop in referral web traffic, as the AI Overviews service (“traffic killer”) provides ready-made answers to user queries directly on the search page, eliminating the need to click through to the original sources. The new measures are intended to strengthen the British media’s negotiating position in disputes with Google regarding fair financial compensation for the use of their content.

According to the government’s official decision, Google is now required to meet two key requirements:

• Ensure the clearest, most visible, and direct links to information sources within AI Overviews so that users always see which publication produced the content.

• Provide publishers with the legal and technical ability to completely prohibit the use of their articles, investigations, and analyses for training future Google AI models without losing their rankings in regular search results.