By Kelvin Chan
Publication Date: 2026-01-28 15:25:00
Britain’s competition watchdog said Wednesday that Google should give news sites and content creators the choice to opt out of having their online content scraped to feed its AI overviews.
It’s part of a set of proposals from the Competition and Markets Authority aimed at loosening the U.S. tech giant’s stranglehold on the U.K’s online search market.
The watchdog last year labeled Google a “strategic” player in online search advertising, using new digital powers to promote more competition by forcing changes to the company’s business practices.
The CMA’s report noted that news publishers have suffered a drop in traffic since Google rolled out its AI Overviews – summaries that appear at the top of some search queries – because fewer users are clicking through to the original articles.
The watchdog said Google should give publishers “meaningful choice” over how their content is used in AI-generated responses; be more transparent about the process; and properly…
