UK CMA hits Google search and its over 90% market share with antitrust probe

The Competition and Markets Authority, the UK's antitrust regulator, is rushing to launch its first formal investigation in 2025 under new rules that come into effect this month. It is investigating Google's market dominance in search, including its new work on artificial intelligence search and its massive search advertising business, and what remedies it might take to improve competition in that area.

Those interested in responding to the survey have until February 3 to comment.

This is the first of two investigations the CMA has committed this month into big tech companies under the new rules, so keep an eye out to see which company will be the subject of the second investigation.

“Millions of people and businesses across the UK rely on Google for search and advertising,” CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement. “That's why it's so important to make sure these services deliver good results for people and businesses and there's a level playing field, especially because artificial intelligence has the potential to transform search services. It's our job to make sure people get the full benefit of search services Choice and innovation, and getting a fair shake – for example in how data is collected and stored, whether you're a competing search engine, an advertiser or a news organization, we want to make sure that's available to all businesses, big and small. ) provides a level playing field to achieve success.”

The CMA chose a simple target: as we all know, Google searches account for over 90% all General search queries in the UK, with over 200,000 businesses advertising using the portal.

Additionally, Google has lost or is losing multiple antitrust cases in other jurisdictions over its search dominance—most recently in its massive home market of the United States, as well as multiple search cases in Europe. The CMA said it was in “regular contact” with other authorities.

The question before the CMA is whether Google's search business can be designated as having a “strategic market position” (SMS). Once designated, “the CMA can impose conduct requirements or propose pro-competitive interventions to achieve positive outcomes for UK consumers and businesses,” the statement said.

It said it would focus on three main areas.

First, it is examining whether Google poses “competitive vulnerabilities and barriers to entry and innovation in search.” Competition is certainly already weak (see market share above), but given the progress we've seen from companies like OpenAI in providing “answers” as alternatives to basic search queries, the barriers to innovation are certainly debatable of.

It will also investigate whether Google prioritizes its own services in areas such as advertising and artificial intelligence. Finally, it will examine whether Google is using large amounts of consumer data without informed consent. This will include the use of content from intellectual property owners and publishers.

In the most intense cases, the investigation could take the form of a recommendation to break up the business, as is the case in the United States. Other remedies may include opening search results to competitors, unbundling the integration locations of their search engines, or opening up advertising to make some of the results available to other parties.

This has already attracted the attention of the CMA: in its announcement, it noted that “effective competition can reduce the cost of search advertising by the equivalent of almost £500 per household per year, thereby lowering prices across the economy.”

Another important area to focus on here is artificial intelligence.

The investigation was announced as Google itself works to improve its search experience in the face of new competition from artificial intelligence services. Services like ChatGPT and Perplexity are using generative AI technology to build effective alternatives to google.com, allowing people to ask questions and receive complete results (rather than a long list of links), which may forego links to other sites entirely.

Google itself has been building its own version of this experience, called Gemini, and it's also returning full search query “answers” at the top of its own results pages. In fact, there's now a unit at the top of the search page where Google can serve up results from its own generative AI technology, potentially giving it a window into potentially being asked to provide GenAI results from other parties.