In the two years since the formal launch of Google AI Overviews, any online publisher (of which we at Bachtrack are one) has become increasingly distressed at Google’s change of role. Rather than indexing content with a view to directing a user to the publisher’s website, Google now displays that content in a procedurally generated summary, while discouraging users from going to the source.
The chorus of distress from publishers eventually led the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to take action: first, by designating Google as having Strategic Market Status in search and search advertising, and then by consulting on a series of proposed “Conduct Requirements”. Today, the CMA published the first of those CRs. While it falls short of what some respondents to the consultation requested, it represents the first step in constraining one of the major AI companies to consider the interests of the publishers whose content they scrape.
The CMA’s new Conduct Requirement asks Google to:
Publish clear, comprehensible and user-friendly information explaining how publishers’ search content is used by Google in its generative AI.
Provide publishers with effective controls over the use of their search content for training (including fine-tuning) and grounding in its generative AI both within and outside search.
Provide publishers with clear and detailed metrics (including impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and the ability to calculate click quality) on user engagement with their search content in search generative AI features.
Take reasonable steps to ensure that search content is attributed clearly and accurately in general search, and that end users have a clear means to access that search content.
Publish clear and comprehensible information explaining its approach to attribution.
The CMA “provisionally” stopped short of the demand from some publishers that Google separate out the crawlers for its search and AI offerings, considering Google’s statement that “crawler separation would be an extreme structural remedy that imposes costs and major disruption to its provision of general search and its users”, adding that “Our assessment continues to be that the costs of enhanced controls would likely be materially lower than the costs of crawler separation, and therefore more proportionate”.
How all this pans out in practice – how and when Google complies with the CR and whether it will genuinely permit publishers to gain more traffic from Google as a result – will become evident over the coming months.
The full text of the CR Decision, CR Notice, Interpretive Notes and Compliance Reporting Notice can be read here.
