The Competition and Markets Authority — the UK’s antitrust authority — is wasting no time launching its first formal investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. He looks into it Google market dominance in searchincluding the new work it’s doing in AI search, as well as the giant search advertising business, and what solutions it might impose to improve competition in the space.
Those interested in answering the survey will have until February 3rd to comment.
This is the first of two investigations the CMA is promising into Big Tech this month under its new rules, so watch out for which company will be the subject of the second.
“Millions of people and businesses across the UK rely on Google’s search and advertising services,” said Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. “That’s why it’s so important to make sure these services deliver good results for people and businesses and that there’s a level playing field, especially as AI has the potential to transform search services. It’s our job to make sure people enjoy the full benefit of choice and innovation in search services and get a fair deal — for example in how their data is collected and stored. And for businesses, whether you’re a competing search engine, advertiser or news organization, we want to make sure there’s a level playing field for all businesses, big and small, to succeed.”
The CMA chose an easy target: Google Search is already known to account for over 90%. all general search queries in the UK More than 200,000 businesses use the portal to advertise.
In addition, Google has already lost or is losing several antitrust cases in other jurisdictions due to its dominance in search — most recently in its huge US home market, alongside multiple search cases in Europe. The CMA said it was in “regular contact” with other authorities.
The CMA’s main issue is whether it can qualify Google’s search business as a “strategic market situation” (SMS). Once appointed, he says, “the CMA can impose conduct requirements or propose pro-competitive interventions to achieve positive outcomes for UK consumers and businesses”.
It will look at three main areas, he said.
First, it examines whether Google poses “weak competition and barriers to entry and innovation in search.” Competition is certainly already weak (see market share, above), but the barriers to innovation are certainly debatable given the progress we’ve seen from companies like OpenAI in providing “answers” as alternatives to basic search queries.
It will also explore whether Google prefers its own services in areas such as advertising and artificial intelligence. And finally, it will look at whether Google is using large amounts of consumer data without informed consent. This will include the use of content by copyright holders and publishers.
In its most drastic case, the investigation could take the form of corporate dissolution proposals, as happened in the US. part of the results in other parts.
This is already on the CMA’s radar: it noted in its announcement that “effective competition could reduce the cost of search advertising, which equates to almost £500 per household per year, in turn lowering prices across the economy” .
The other big area to look at here is artificial intelligence.
The announcement of the research comes at a time when Google itself is trying to improve the search experience in the face of new competition from artificial intelligence-based services. Services like ChatGPT and Perplexity create effective alternatives google.com using genetic AI technology to allow people to ask questions and receive – instead of a long list of links – fully formed results, which may forgo links to other sites altogether.
Google itself has created its own version of this experience, called Geminiand also returns fully formed “answers” to search queries at the top of its own results pages. The fact that there is now a module at the top of search pages where Google provides results from its own generated AI technology potentially gives it a window where it could be asked to provide GenAI results from other parties.
