Google’s response to the CMA’s consultation on potential requirements for Search

Google builds tools and services that help people and businesses across the UK every day. That reality guides our engagement with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on its proposals for new digital market rules. We support the CMA’s goals of ensuring fairness and promoting publisher choice and control, and here offer some ideas on how new digital rules can best serve the British public:

Keep Search results fair and useful

We design our ranking systems to show the most relevant, highest-quality results for your query. We don’t give our own products special treatment, a fact confirmed by the CMA’s own reviews. Some third-party proposals (unsupported by evidence) could expose our systems, and thus our users, to manipulation and abuse. This would make it harder to fight spam, and ultimately slow down our ability to launch improvements for UK users.

Make it easy to choose your favorite services

Android users can easily choose their preferred services, and in the UK even display choice screens at the set-up of new Android devices. At the same time, we know that people don’t like being bombarded with frequent, interruptive pop-ups, and that the proposal that we show more choice screens every year, on top of when you set up a new device, would annoy users. Instead, we’ve proposed a less intrusive, permanent central switch in your device’s settings, making it easy to change your default search engine any time, without the annoying interruptions.

Give publishers even greater control

As the web evolves, our goal is to make sure website owners have the right controls to manage how their content is used. Features like AI Overviews make links to sources more prominent, helping people discover web content remains central to our approach. We are developing further updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt-out of generative AI features in Search.

We will continue to work constructively with the CMA to find practical solutions that benefit users, publishers, and businesses across the UK.