Publishers have called for the UK’s competition watchdog to include Gemini in its investigation into Google’s market dominance, with AI Mode and AI Overviews already scoped for inspection.
Publishers including DMG Media and Guardian Media Group have responded to the CMA’s strategic market status (SMS) investigation into Google’s search and search advertising services. If the CMA designates Google with SMS, it would see the tech giant regulated under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act.
The act, which came into force on 1 January 2025, empowers the CMA to impose conduct requirements on companies found to have SMS, for example by requiring them to pay for news content that appears on their platforms or provide greater information to users about service changes.
It is aimed at preventing market abuse by dominant tech platforms.
The CMA has proposed to include AI Overviews (AIO) and AI Mode in its investigation, but has not included Gemini by Google.
Google has defended the exclusion of Gemini because it is an “content generation tool”, “not a market leader in AI assistants”, and claimed it is accessed, branded and monetised differently to Google search.
Despite the CMA excluding Gemini AI assistant from the “relevant digital activity” in the investigation, its report “signals an intent to re-evaluate its inclusion”, according to Google, which also claims this is “based on unknown and unknowable criteria”.
DMG Media
Owner of Daily Mail, Metro, i newspaper and New Scientist, DMG Media said the CMA’s proposed decision should also include Gemini and Google News.
Gemini is “an indistinguishable part of Google’s plan to leverage its dominance of search into dominance of AI”, it said, adding Gemini relies on the same search crawlers, indexing, and ranking algorithms that is used to power Google Search, and the technology used to power Gemini overlaps with AIO and AI Mode.
“As its market share increases it is highly likely that Google will encourage users to view Gemini as an alternative to, or substitute for Search,” it said.
DMG Media also wrote that not only does Gemini “overwhelmingly” refer users to Google-owned Youtube, but the video platform is also now getting most referral traffic in both the US and the UK through AI Mode and AIO.
One of the “strengths of Daily Mail” is its web traffic, DMG Media said, with users allegedly spending more than 30 minutes on the site. This means direct traffic is more valuable than referral traffic, with Google operating as a navigational tool.
However, when Daily Mail is Google-searched, AI Mode provides a summary of the publisher’s history instead of stories, risking zero clickthrough.
“We suspect it may not be long before Google starts synthesising our content to create its own AI stories,” the response said, adding it is a “natural end result of self-preferencing Google”.
The media giant is also calling for: the ability to appeal to an independent adjudicator, Google to publish search engine results page (SERP) policies and algorithm rankings, to provide notice before making changes to search algorithm, and to provide free of charge data on material scraped through web crawling.
It also urged for the CMA to prioritise content attribution to publishers, including a prominent logo, clickable publisher URL, and accurate content with reporting preserved
Also, the ability to have content removed from search is “important”, as sometimes the publishers need to take down articles – DMG Media said it is not clear if this means removed from AIOs.
Independent Media Association, Independent Community News Network and more
The Independent Media Association, Independent Community News Network, Association of Online Publishers and the Independent Publishers Alliance came together to urge the CMA to recognise Gemini and Google Discover, and also call for Youtube and Google to be regulated as a “unified regulatory framework”.
This would “simplify enforcement”, it said, and avoid processes would add costs and complex data analysis for publishers.
It also warned that Google could avoid SMS rules by simply “rebranding” its search services.
Additionally, partnerships, such as Google’s with Reddit, must be “treated as a form of preferential treatment”. This is because Google gains the “same competitive benefits” of building its own community platform “without the burdens of content management as well as being able to promote it…as if it was its own site”, which has a “knock-on effect on competition”.
“The implication for the broader market is clear: if content creators or communities do not provide their data to Google, they risk being deprioritised,” it said.
The coalition also called for UK trade associations to be assigned “a named human point of contact” within Google’s UK operations to provide adequate response to publisher complaints – a minimum five-strong team of full-time UK-based staff.
It also demanded compensation for use of publisher content in AI-generated outputs, with the CMA facilitating the development of a per-query/prompt compensation model, and Google to receive penalties for late, inaccurate or incomplete data delivery.
Which?
Which? was the only publisher to support the exclusion of Gemini in the CMA’s proposed decision.
“Gemini doesn’t need to be included yet, because AI assistants are still new and not widely used as a replacement for search engines,” Which? said.
It added that Gemini may need to be included in the future as it becomes more powerful.
Others
The Guardian Media Group, News Media Association, and the European Publishers Council (EPC) challenged the exclusion of Gemini and Google News.
The Guardian Media Group also requested the CMA requires Google to give publishers access to referral traffic from AI Overviews, AI Mode and any future AI Search products.
Charity Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) made reference to local news outlets shutting due to declining revenues, and recommended a “new regulatory code to rebalance the relationship between publishers and online platforms”. It urged the CMA to bring forward the measure as high-risk.
“The Government has said that it will take more than nine months for its economic assessment on the issue of AI and copyright infringement putting those results well into 2026,” it said. “It is unfair to the digital news market to hold it hostage…for some months or even years.”
Google’s response to the CMA’s proposed decision was largely in disagreement, with an exception of the exclusion of Gemini.
It also claimed that an SMS investigation will lead to 13 potential interventions over five years, which will impact product launches and UK operations, which affects UK businesses and consumers.
It also said the CMA was understating the competitive constraints from Amazon, other large retailers, and AI assistants, “all of which are expected to grow materially during the designation period”.
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