What happened
On 3 June, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued an order to Google: publishers may specify which pages and which directories stay out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover — and Google may not push their search rankings down for opting out. Google must also hand over data on how publisher content is being used, and attribute sources clearly in its answers.
The order has teeth because the groundwork was laid last year. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA designated Google’s general search and search advertising as holding “Strategic Market Status” (SMS) on 10 October 2025 — that step only confirmed Google was an entity the regulator could issue orders to; it required nothing in itself. This June’s publisher conduct requirement is the substance. Google has nine months to implement it, landing around March 2027.
It is still moving. Google is testing the public opt-out with a small group of UK publishers now, and says a global rollout follows once testing completes — with no date attached.
Why it matters to you
Start with the boundary of the order: what it secures is the right to refuse, not the right to be cited. A regulator can force Google to let you leave AI Overviews. It cannot force Google to mention you in an answer. Those two read as one thing in a headline and point in opposite directions for your business.
Why UK news publishers fought for this is clear from the numbers. Reach, one of the UK’s large news publishing groups, reported in its first-half 2026 results that Google referral traffic fell 55% year on year, with on-site page views down 40%. For a company that lives on ad inventory, that is survival — and the right to opt out is the only leverage it holds going into a negotiation with Google. Stop feeding your AI Overviews, and see whether you want to talk about licensing fees.
Leverage only counts as leverage if the other side wants what you have. Reach holds millions of original reports; pull them and Google’s AI Overviews are short of material. Pull your brand site, your product pages, your case studies, and the model reaches for a different source. Same switch: a publisher presses it to bargain, you press it to walk out of the room — and nobody comes knocking to ask why you disappeared.
The direction of the past month is worth sitting with. On 15 September, Cloudflare’s default block on AI crawlers also takes effect. The two moves come from entirely different motives — an infrastructure company wants to charge for access, a regulator wants to rescue publishers — and yet both hand you the same switch, labelled leave. The scarce one, labelled stay, and get cited, is not being handed out by anybody.
Google’s own position belongs here too. Sundar Pichai and Head of Search Liz Reid have argued publicly that what AI Overviews remove are mostly low-value clicks — the user only ever wanted one fact, glanced at the page, and left. That argument does not dispute that clicks are falling; it disputes whether those clicks were worth anything. For anyone building a brand, the argument clarifies things: the traffic that survives is the visit a user makes after the AI has answered, because they specifically wanted you. For how the wider split between rising visibility and falling clicks came about, the great decoupling covers it in full.
Should you act now
Two things not to do. Do not go researching how to opt out — the option is in UK testing, you cannot reach it, and when it does go global most brands should leave it alone. And do not wait for regulators to fix Google on your behalf: the CMA’s jurisdiction stops at the UK market, brands outside it are not covered, and what you get is the spillover (Google generally builds compliance features once, globally, because it is cheaper) rather than protection.
What deserves your attention is more basic: when an AI answers a question in your industry, is your site among the handful of sources it cites? That question is entirely independent of whether you hold an opt-out right, and no amount of regulation will improve it. An opt-out is a tourniquet for sites being scraped too hard. A site that is neither scraped nor cited has no bleeding to stop.
Platform defaults have flipped several times this year, regulators have only just started, and it will flip again. Every flip means checking once more whether you fell out of the answers — which crawler got blocked, which citation vanished, which page got excluded. That is something a person has to watch on a schedule, not a setting you configure once.
If you want to know how AI currently describes your brand, and whether it treats you as a source, we can take a look first.