The Competition and Markets Authority has given Google six months to make organic search results and AI generated summaries meet "objective and non discriminatory" standards, with a real complaints process attached, and three months to let UK users move their search history to…
The UK competition regulator has handed Google two enforceable conduct requirements covering how the company ranks search results and handles user data, with implementation deadlines of six months and three months respectively. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) order, reported by Richard Speed for The Register on 17 June 2026, is the most concrete post-Brexit regulatory hook the UK has put into a major US platform since the country left the EU's Digital Markets Act regime.
The first requirement forces Google to apply "objective and non-discriminatory criteria" to its search rankings, covering both standard organic results and AI Overviews — Google's AI-generated summary boxes that appear above the link list for some queries. Google must publish the criteria, give meaningful notice before ranking changes take effect, and run a complaints channel that can actually force a remedy. The second requirement puts UK users' search data on the same legal footing as under the EU DMA: with the user's approval, a third-party service can receive the search history and other personal data Google holds, in a usable format.
The framing of "neither fair nor transparent" originated in complaints UK businesses filed with the regulator about unexplained ranking shifts and the absence of any meaningful appeals process. The CMA's response, per its own press release, is to turn contestability into a legal duty, not a courtesy.
Google disputes the premise. A spokesperson told The Register that "our ranking systems are fair, transparent and show the most relevant, highest quality results," and that the company will "work constructively with the CMA." That position is fine as a quote, but it now has to be backed by a published standard and a working complaints process.
The carve-outs are real. Sponsored results are explicitly out of scope: the regulator is not touching Google's advertising business. The data-portability requirement, by contrast, is closer to a formalisation, since Google already operates a UK Data Portability API on a voluntary basis, and the new rule moves that capability into enforceable territory. The CMA also signalled that "more activity is expected over the summer", which puts this order at the front of a series of UK actions, not at the end of one.
For UK businesses that depend on Google Search traffic, the practical change is the complaints channel. A merchant or publisher whose ranking drops can demand an explanation, and if the explanation is inadequate, the regulator now has a basis to act. For rival search engines, the portability requirement opens a path to acquire users with their full history intact. For publishers wondering whether AI Overviews will keep using their content without attribution, the answer from this order is no: AI-generated summaries are explicitly in scope and cannot be routed around the same contestability rules that apply to the standard results beneath them.
The mechanism is incremental rather than tectonic. The CMA is not breaking up Google Search or capping its market share. It is doing something narrower and harder to dismiss: turning the assumptions behind Google's ranking machinery into a published, contestable standard. The test is whether the six-month clock produces a standard a non-engineer can actually read, and whether the complaints process has teeth the first time a UK business or user uses it.