The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened an antitrust investigation into Google Search, making it the watchdog’s first official investigation of 2025 under new rules that came into effect this month.
The inquiry focuses on Google’s position in search, its search advertising business, and the way AI is changing how people find information online. Interested parties have until February 3 to comment.
Why Google Search is under review
The CMA is examining whether Google’s search business should be designated as having strategic market status, or SMS. If that happens, the regulator says it can impose conduct requirements or propose pro-competition interventions aimed at better outcomes for U.K. consumers and businesses.
The starting point is Google’s scale. 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.
That combination makes search more than a consumer product. It is also a route to customers for advertisers, a discovery layer for publishers and news organisations, and a competitive arena for rival search engines.
The CMA has also said it is in regular contact with other authorities. Google has already lost or is losing multiple antitrust cases in other jurisdictions over search dominance, including in the U.S. and Europe.
The three areas the CMA will examine
The investigation is centered on three main questions. Each one goes to a different part of how search markets work and how Google’s position may affect competitors, advertisers, publishers and users.
- Competition and entry: The CMA will look at whether Google is connected to weak competition and barriers to entry and innovation in search.
- Self-preferencing: The regulator will investigate whether Google gives preference to its own services in areas such as advertising and AI.
- Data and consent: The CMA will consider whether Google is using large quantities of consumer data without informed consent, including content from intellectual property owners and publishers.
The competition question is especially important because search markets can be difficult to enter when one service already handles the overwhelming majority of queries. At the same time, the source article notes that the barriers to innovation are debatable because companies such as OpenAI have been offering answer-based alternatives to basic search queries.
The data question also broadens the inquiry beyond rankings and ad placement. It brings in how information is collected, stored and used, including material connected to publishers and other intellectual property owners.
AI search raises the stakes
The investigation arrives as Google is working to improve its search experience in response to competition from AI-based services. ChatGPT and Perplexity are building alternatives to google.com using generative AI technology, allowing users to ask questions and receive fully formed results instead of a long list of links.
Google has been building its own version of this experience, called Gemini. It has also been returning fully formed answers to search queries at the top of its own results pages.
That matters for competition because the top of a search results page is valuable space. If Google uses its own generative AI technology there, regulators may ask whether other providers should have access to that kind of placement or whether Google is favoring its own services.
AI also changes the relationship between search engines and the open web. When a service gives a complete answer directly, users may not click through to other sites. The CMA’s review of content from intellectual property owners and publishers sits inside that larger shift.
What remedies could follow
The CMA has not decided the outcome. But once a business receives strategic market status, the regulator says it can use conduct requirements or pro-competition interventions.
The source article describes several possible remedies. The most drastic could resemble business breakup proposals seen in the U.S. Other options could include opening up search results to competitors, unbundling areas where Google’s search engine is integrated, or opening up the advertising part of results to other parties.
Search advertising costs are already part of the regulator’s concern. The CMA noted 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.
This is also not the only Big Tech investigation expected under the CMA’s new rules this month. The watchdog has said this is the first of two investigations it is promising into Big Tech, with the second company still to be watched for.
For now, the investigation puts Google Search, AI answers, search advertising and data use into one regulatory frame. The outcome could shape not only how people search, but also how businesses compete for attention in the U.K. digital market.