When a regulator hands an industry a win, the interesting detail is usually what the industry didn’t get.
The Professional Publishers Association welcomed the CMA’s publisher conduct requirement on Google Search. It also said fairly plainly that the control being delivered is blunter than the one publishers argued for.
The Recommendation That Didn’t Land
The requirement gives publishers a control over whether their content can be used within AI-powered search features including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The CMA adopted several publisher recommendations, including ones on fine-tuning and page-level controls.
It didn’t adopt the one publishers seem to have wanted most. As the PPA put it, the regulator hasn’t introduced controls on a per-feature and per-purpose basis, so publishers will not be able to manage participation across individual AI search products separately.
One control covers AI Mode, AI Overviews and everything else. One control likewise covers crawling, training and grounding.
PPA chief executive Saj Merali spelled out the consequence: publishers have to decide whether their content appears across all AI search features or none, and if they allow training there’s no separate route to opt out of grounding.
Grounding, where a model pulls current content to answer a live query, is a different proposition from training. Plenty of publishers would treat them differently if they could.
All-or-Nothing Produces Strange Behaviour
Coarse controls create edge cases, and these ones are commercially significant.
Take a publisher whose content spans editorial commentary and transactional listings. The commentary is actively harmed by summarisation, because the summary substitutes for the article. The listings probably benefit from appearing in AI results, because a listing can’t be summarised into irrelevance.
Under a per-feature regime that publisher opts out selectively. Under a single control they have to pick which half of the business to optimise for.
Most will land on visibility, because the downside of invisibility is immediate and measurable while the downside of summarisation is gradual.
So the opt-out may see lower uptake than the headlines imply, and the results page may change less than the world-first framing suggests. That matters most in the verticals where the top of the page is the whole shop window. Car retail is the obvious one, where agencies like Localise build dealer visibility around stock listings that live or die on how far down the page they land.
Citation Is Not Traffic
The requirement does force clearer attribution, with publisher content properly linked inside AI-generated results.
Merali’s concern goes past link presence. Publishers need to understand not only when their content is used but how, particularly where an AI response reduces the incentive to visit the source at all.
Being named in an AI answer isn’t the same as being visited, and for informational content the two have decoupled almost completely.
The PPA has asked the CMA for further clarification on how page-level controls will work in practice, which suggests the implementation detail isn’t settled even among the people who negotiated it. Google has up to nine months to implement, though the CMA expects publisher controls sooner.
Still Outstanding
This decision covers publisher controls only. Final decisions on fair rankings and user choice were still pending when the PPA responded, and the association has said those will shape the relationship between publishers, platforms and audiences.
Fair ranking is arguably the bigger of the two for commercial content, because it governs how Google orders results rather than how it summarises them, and ordering decides what gets seen.
The CMA has also committed to monitoring AI search developments, which the PPA singled out given how fast the products change.
The regime is operating in a market that keeps moving underneath it. Google announced substantial changes to its search platform in May 2026, after the consultation on these controls closed, and the conduct requirement was extended to cover them.
For publishers, advertisers and retailers relying on search-driven discovery, the rules governing that page are now under active revision by a UK regulator with further decisions pending. Planning around a stable results page isn’t a reasonable assumption any more.
