The Competition and Markets Authority — the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog — is wasting no time in lodging its first official investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. It’s looking into the market dominance of Google in Search, including the new work it’s doing in AI search as well as its giant search advertising business, and what remedies it might impose to improve competition in the space.
Those interested in responding to the investigation will have until February 3 to comment.
This is the first of two investigations that the CMA is promising into Big Tech this month under its new rules, so keep an eye out for which company will be the subject of the second one.
“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 ensure these services are delivering good outcomes for people and businesses and that there is a level playing field, especially as AI has the potential to transform search services. It’s our job to ensure people get 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 are a rival search engine, an advertiser or a news organisation, we want to ensure there is a level playing field for all businesses, large and small, to succeed.”
The CMA has picked an easy target: it’s already known that Google Search accounts for over 90% of all general search queries in the U.K., and more than 200,000 businesses use the portal to advertise.
Plus, Google has already lost or is losing multiple antitrust cases in other jurisdictions over its search dominance — most recently in its huge home market of the U.S., alongside multiple search cases in Europe. The CMA said it is in “regular contact” with other authorities.
At issue for the CMA is whether it can designate Google’s search business as having “strategic market status” (SMS). Once designated, it says, “the CMA can impose conduct requirements or propose pro-competition interventions to achieve positive outcomes for UK consumers and businesses.”
It will look in three main areas, it said.
First, it’s looking at whether Google is posing “weak competition and barriers to entry and innovation in search.” Competition definitely is already weak (see market share, above), but the barriers to innovation are definitely debatable, given the advances we’ve seen from companies like OpenAI in providing “answers” as alternatives to basic search queries.
It will also investigate whether Google gives preference to its own services in areas like advertising and AI. And lastly, it will look at whether Google is using large quantities of consumer data without informed consent. This will include using content from intellectual property owners and publishers.
At its most drastic, the investigation could play out in the form of business break-up proposals, as they have in the U.S. Other remedies could include opening up search results to competitors, unbundling where its search engine is integrated, or opening up the advertising part of the results to other parties.
This is already on the CMA’s radar: it noted in its announcement that “effective competition could keep down the costs of search advertising, equivalent to nearly £500 per household per year, in turn lowering prices across the economy.”
The other big area to look at here is AI.
The announcement of the investigation is coming at a time when Google is itself scrambling to improve its search experience in the face of new competition from AI-based services. Services like ChatGPT and Perplexity are building effective alternatives to google.com using generative AI technology to allow people to ask questions and receive — instead of a long list of links — fully-formed results, which might forego links to other sites altogether.
Google itself has been building its own version of this experience, called Gemini, and it also has been returning fully-formed ‘answers’ to search queries at the top of its own results pages. The fact that there is now a unit at the top of search pages where Google delivers results from its own generative AI tech potentially gives it a window where it could be required to provide GenAI results from other parties.
