A legal complaint has been submitted to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over the impact of Google AI Overviews on news publishers.
A collaboration between tech justice non-profit Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web aims to “stop Google stealing the work of British journalists”.
The complaint, supported by antitrust law firm Preiskel and Co, is asking the CMA to implement interim measures preventing Google from “misusing” publisher content in AI-generated responses while the watchdog gears up to carry out proposed action.
It says: “This complaint constitutes a formal submission that Google is abusing its market dominance in the supply of results from its search engine, Google Search, in the same way as it has been held by the European Commission and European Courts that through restricting visibility in search results, Google has abused its dominance in online Search.”
The CMA said last week it plans to designate Google as a tech platform with strategic market status under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 in October, meaning it will gain the power to ensure the company trades on “fair and reasonable terms” with news publishers.
The CMA plans to give publishers more control over how their content appears in Google, which may include letting them opt out of AI Overviews without removing their entire website from search. The new complaint said publishers “urgently” need the ability to opt out of AI Overviews (without being barred from normal search results pages).
Court documents published in May as part of a US antitrust trial into Google’s search monopoly revealed Google considered letting publishers opt out of letting their data be used for AI grounding and still appear in search results but that it decided this would be a “hard red line” as it was “evolving into a space for monetisation”.
The new complaint submitted to the CMA noted that due to Google’s market dominance, opting out of AI and therefore search “would be to become effectively invisible online, a devastating blow for a news organisation”.
It contends that Google AI Overviews are causing “serious irreparable harm” to the UK news industry via the loss of traffic, readership and revenue, and that immediate action is needed.
Mail Online director of SEO and editorial e-commerce Carly Steven said in May that the site is seeing a massive drop in clickthrough rates from search results when an AI Overviews summary is present, with the average clickthrough rate dropping by 56.1% on desktop and 48.2% on mobile.
Foxglove director Rosa Curling said: “It’s bad enough that Google’s AI products are stealing journalists’ work without paying for it. But worse still, that stolen work is then used to give Google an advantage over the very news organisations they stole it from. Google’s AI Overviews devastate news organisations’ ability to reach their readers online – the independent news industry is already struggling, but this risks sinking them altogether.
“It’s welcome that the CMA has woken up to this problem, but the news industry can’t afford to await the conclusions of a lengthy consultation period. We need action now. Otherwise independent media – a crucial pillar of our democracy – will be irreparably damaged by the time the regulator comes up with measures to protect it.
“The CMA needs to act urgently to ensure news organisations have a way to opt out of Google nicking their work, without Google disappearing them from search results altogether. Regulators from the US to South Africa have already realised this is the solution – the UK risks being left behind, with devastating consequences for our news outlets.”
Movement for an Open Web co-founder James Rosewell said: “Google’s AI Overviews steal from publishers on two fronts. They steal publishers’ content to feed their AI model and then they use this capability to steal traffic by putting the Overview ahead of the links to the original content. This is a clear example of a proven monopolist abusing using its power to exploit content owners and discriminate against its competitors and it must be stopped now.
“The CMA are – rightly – undertaking a thorough and detailed review of potential actions against Google but we can’t just sit by in the meantime and watch as news brands get decimated. The harm to publishers is serious, significant and irreparable. We need interim action now to save the UK publishing industry before it’s too late.”
The proposed remedies include that a conduct requirement should be imposed on Google to “stop exploiting news publishing organisations via its terms and conditions and use of data and publishers’ content in AI Overviews”.
The complaint says this could be by enabling “an opt out from crawling, scraping and ingesting data and publishers’ content for its AI capabilities, while ensuring that news publishing organisations continue to be indexed and shown on a non-discriminatory basis as part of Google’s general search and in its search results pages” and by providing “fair compensation for all publishers’ content”.
The complaint adds: “The CMA may use its enforcement powers to impose interim measures to prevent further infringement in order to protect competition, prevent significant damage to publishers, and protect the public interest.
“Given the ongoing harm to publishers and impact on the plurality of the media, such interim measures should apply to prevent the crawling, indexing and scraping of data and content for use in Google’s AI Overviews, pending the outcome of the assessment of fair compensation and the CMA’s further investigation of any suspected breach of the conduct requirement, and the investigations commenced under the DMCCA [Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act].”
A CMA spokesperson said: “Last week, we proposed to designate Google with strategic market status in search and search advertising. If designated, this would allow us to introduce targeted measured to address specific aspects of how Google operates search services in the UK.
“The scope of our proposed designation would include Google’s AI Overviews, and we have published a roadmap which sets out potential early actions to improve outcomes for consumers, businesses and publishers.”
A Google spokesperson said: “More than any other company, Google prioritises sending traffic to the web, and we send billions of clicks to websites each day.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered. Publishers have control over what content appears in Search, which includes AI Overviews.”
Google has said website owners can opt out from AI Overviews but not search using “snippet controls” which reduces the amount of information available in search results – something that has previously been linked to traffic loss.
The spokesperson also said Google feels the CMA’s work is broad and unfocused, looking at interventions before the full evidence has been considered.
Google’s vice president, head of search Elizabeth Reid said in a blog in May that AI Overviews is “one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade” because people are “happier with their results, and they search more often”.
Citing internal data from September to April, she said that in Google’s biggest markets like US and India AI Overviews are “driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews” compared to a cohort not shown the AI-generated summaries.
Google’s vice president of news partnerships Jaffer Zaidi said in May that AI Overviews are purposefully not triggered for hard news queries – although the complaint cites evidence showing they are showing for some non-breaking news – and that they lead to better publisher value because users stay on websites longer after being referred from them compared to traditional links in search results.
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