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CMA confirms Google has strategic market status in search services

ended 10. October 2025

Any thoughts on the announcement below, send them across ASAP as this news has just dropped.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today confirmed that the legal tests have been met to designate Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search and search advertising services.  

The UK’s new digital markets competition regime came into force on 1 January 2025, allowing the CMA to take targeted and proportionate action to improve competition in digital markets, helping to drive innovation, investment and growth across the UK economy.  

The CMA launched an investigation into Google’s general search and search advertising services on 14 January and consulted on its proposed decision in June that Google should be designated with strategic market status.  

Since this proposed decision, the CMA has gathered evidence and received feedback from more than 80 stakeholders as well as having constructive engagement with Google. Having analysed the feedback, the CMA has: 

Confirmed that Google has substantial and entrenched market power in general search and search advertising and has been designated with strategic market status. 

Confirmed that Google’s Gemini AI assistant is not in scope of the designation. However, this position will be kept under review given uncertainty over how the market is developing and could be amended in future if certain factors change and following consultation.  

Confirmed that other AI-based search features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, are in scope of the designation. 

Clarified the scope of designation with respect to Google’s news products, and Google’s syndication products.  

Designating Google with SMS is not a finding of wrongdoing and does not introduce any immediate requirements. However, it enables the CMA to consider proportionate, targeted interventions to ensure that general search services are open to effective competition, and that consumers and businesses that rely on Google can have confidence that they are treated fairly.

4 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Kate Allen
Owner at Finest Stays
Regulating a company with this level of integration across digital ecosystems, where its reach extends from search to advertising to AI, is like trying to slow the tide with a sandcastle.

Being deeply entrenched in both PPC and SEO campaigns, this announcement comes as no surprise. The ever-powerful Google, the behemoth of search, has long held the market in a vice-like advertising grip, leaving little room for competitors or alternative models to breathe. Its dominance in general search and search advertising is as entrenched as it is influential.

With Google’s accelerating move into AI-driven search through Gemini, AI Overviews, and other emerging features, the CMA’s designation of strategic market status feels justified, yet I struggle to see how effective intervention can truly be.
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Mitali Deypurkaystha
AI Governance Strategist & CMO at AISensa
The CMA’s move to give Google Strategic Market Status is timely and necessary, and I'm especially happy they've included AI overviews under the remit. AI Overviews is certainly innovative, but for many UK creators, they’re an existential threat. A study by Rand Fishkin found that 59.7% of Google searches in the EU now end in zero clicks, a figure that’s surged since AI Overviews launched in May 2024. It’s understandable why Google moved fast. OpenAI’s ChatGPT suddenly turned search into a battleground, and AI Overviews are its counter-attack. But in defending its market share, Google risks rewriting the web’s social contract. Users get instant answers; creators lose traffic, ad revenue and visibility. It’s a quiet erosion of the open web, and of the small publishers and thought leaders who built Google’s ecosystem in the first place. Unless Google rebalances how it uses creators’ content inside AI Overviews, it could hollow out the very innovation economy that fuels its own relevance.
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Tom Fletcher
Head of Marketing at Gravitate Accounting
Google’s dominance of search has long dictated how people and brands plan content, optimise for visibility, and allocate ad spend. "SEO" effectively means "Google optimisation".

By designating Google with strategic market status, the CMA is recognising that the playing field needs levelling, or at least that greater transparency and fairer competition in both organic and paid search are needed. It’s hard to see this as anything other than positive, though everything will depend on what these ‘interventions’ actually look like in practice.

For content marketers and SEOs, it’s a reminder to diversify traffic sources and closely monitor how AI-driven features like AI Overviews evolve and are regulated.

Google will remain central to content marketing strategy for years, but its monopoly may not last forever.

The ‘SEO is dead’ theories are exaggerated, though change is clearly underway.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
The CMA is right to call it strategic: AI search isn’t just a fancy autocomplete, it’s a structural threat to open commerce.

Google decides who gets seen, how they are seen, when they are seen and, crucially, who gets paid in the end. It shapes public knowledge, product discovery, and even political visibility.

This designation isn’t about punishing Google. It's about putting hazard lights around a system that touches nearly every consumer and business in the UK.

When 90% of UK searches go through one platform, and that platform starts rewriting the raw data and ordering the results pages using AI, potentially to suit its own ends, we’ve moved from a software problem to a fundamental ethics one.

The real risk now is that Google ticks the compliance box on paper, while the technology keeps evolving faster than the law can follow.