APREX · EST. 2026
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered Google to offer web publishers a genuine choice: their content must be excludable from the company's generative AI search features — without that decision affecting their rankings in traditional search results. The regulation, which TechCrunch reports is planned for global rollout following a UK trial period, represents one of the most concrete regulatory interventions against AI search to date.
CMA Designated Google a Strategic Market Participant
The order stems from the CMA's decision in October 2025 to grant Google Search what UK regulatory language calls "strategic market status" — a designation that gives authorities the power to impose direct behavioural requirements on the company. One of those requirements is that Google must provide "effective tools" enabling publishers to prevent their content from being used in AI-generated responses and for so-called fine-tuning of AI models.
The control tool is planned to appear as a toggle within Google Search Console. Google has nine months to implement all the required changes. The CMA is also requiring that AI-generated results include clear source attribution with links back to the original content.
Publishers must be able to keep their content out of AI search without being penalised in ordinary search results
Publishers Have Long Fought AI Scraping
This regulation does not come out of nowhere. Media organisations have spent years trying to protect their content through technical and legal means — with mixed results.
Research from January 2026 shows that eight in ten leading news websites in the US and UK block at least one AI training crawler, and 71 percent block AI bots used for active search and data retrieval. Media company Gannett reported in September 2025 that it had blocked 75 million AI bot visits across its platforms — roughly 70 million of them from OpenAI alone, according to the research.
Nevertheless, technical measures have proven insufficient. Experts note that compliance with robots.txt is voluntary, and that content already incorporated into training datasets cannot simply be removed from a fully trained model.
The EU Has a Parallel Approach
The UK is not alone in regulating this space. The EU's 2019 Copyright Directive generally permits AI companies to use publicly available content for text mining and data analysis — but only if the rights holder has not actively opted out in a machine-readable format. This means European publishers, including Norwegian media outlets, must make a proactive choice and declare an opt-out for the directive's protections to apply.
In practice, this means Norwegian media organisations that wish to reserve their content against AI use should already be considering both robots.txt directives and explicit declarations in line with the EU directive — while awaiting the possible global standardisation of the British model.
Norwegian Publishers Should Pay Attention
Although the UK regulation is currently limited to Britain, TechCrunch reports that Google will roll out the opt-out tool globally after the trial period. This means Norwegian newspapers, trade publications, and other web publishers will likely gain access to the same toggle in Google Search Console.
What opting out of AI search will actually mean for traffic and visibility remains to be seen. Publishers that opt out risk losing exposure on a search surface that is growing rapidly — but in return retain control over how their content is used and presented. For IAB CEO David Cohen, the stakes are clear: without protection, he has warned, the internet risks becoming "a shadow of itself" if AI bots are free to exploit publishers' content unchecked.
The British model will serve as a critical test of whether regulatory opt-out mechanisms actually work in practice — or whether they merely give publishers the illusion of control.