THE UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened a consultation on conduct requirements for Google, inviting comments before any final measures are imposed to address publishers’ lack of choice and transparency in how Google uses content for its generative AI services. In January 2025, the DMCC framework allowed CMA designations of Strategic Market Status, and in October 2025 Google was designated with SMS in general search and search advertising, enabling legally enforceable rules relating to AI crawling.
The piece argues that publishers should have meaningful control over their content and criticises current opt-out mechanisms as insufficient, urging crawler separation so Googlebot can be split by purpose to allow traditional search crawling while blocking AI use of content. Cloudflare notes that, despite CMA recognition of the problem, the proposed remedies would still bind publishers to Google’s platform-based controls, rather than giving autonomous, external options for managing access and compensation.
According to the CMA, publishers lack realistic options to prevent their search content from being used in AI responses, which Cloudflare says undermines fair competition and publisher monetisation. The article concludes that mandatory crawler separation is the only effective solution to level the playing field between AI developers and Google, and to empower UK publishers to control how their data is used.