Most regulations land on businesses with some sort of cost. Whether it’s a form to file, a banner to add, or a policy to write or revise.
The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) new requirements on Google, announced on the 3rd and 17th June 2026, appear to be an unusual exception. And for once, it seems, the burden falls almost entirely on the largest company involved, and the potential benefits could trickle down to everyone who relies on Google to be found.
So, if you run a small or medium business in north-east Hampshire, Surrey or anywhere else in the UK, this one is, quietly, working in your favour. The trick is knowing what to do with it.
What changed, in one paragraph
Google now has two binding obligations:
- It must rank ordinary search results, including the ones powering AI Overviews, on objective and fair criteria, be more open about how that works, give advance notice before significant changes, and offer proper routes to raise concerns.
- Separately, it must let people legally export their own Google search data to other approved services.
And the regulator deliberately defined the protected group as everyone who publishes content on the web for UK users, not just big media. According to the small-print, your business website is covered because the CMA named publishers, and if you publish anything on the web via your website, then you are… a publisher.
Now that’s a distinction we’ve known for years, ever since being a publisher on a business consultancy website way back in 2000. But the fact that the CMA has now and actively made this point provides absolute clarity for UK website owners.
Predictability is a commercial asset, so treat it like one
The most valuable thing in the whole package looks pretty boring on the surface: and that’s the point about advance notice. But Google now has to warn the market before making significant ranking changes, with a minimum of 30 business days for changes you can act on and 15 for broader ones. You’d be forgiven for thinking that merely sounds like an SEO technicality but in reality and more broadly that’s a planning tool.
Think about this, about how marketing decisions get made in a typical small or medium-sized business (SME). You commit a budget to a campaign, a website rebuild or a content push, and you do it in the dark, hoping that Google does not move the goalposts the week you launch. But a new notice period really changes that calculus. It means that a competent partner can time your work around known changes rather than against them, and can tell you to “hold that launch a fortnight because there’s a significant change coming” with actual facts to base that strategic decision on. Used well, that is fewer wasted campaigns and better-timed investment. The value is not the regulation; it is the planning it makes possible, and that only happens if someone’s paying attention on your behalf.
The data portability angle nobody is talking about yet
While it seems most people in my orbit are discussing the rankings angle, the second requirement is the more interesting commercial story. Google’s tool for exporting a user’s own search data, previously voluntary, is now a legal right, bringing the UK into line with the EU. The intended uses are things like cashback, loyalty and personalised offers built on what someone actually searches for.
For most websites and businesses, this is not an immediate to-do. But if your business model touches rewards, recommendations, comparison or personalisation, then this is a new, legally underpinned source of consented data to build on, and the firms that move early tend to define the category. It’s the sort of thing worth a half-hour conversation now rather than a scramble in eighteen months when a competitor has already shipped it. I’d rather flag it early and have it turn out to be nothing for you than the reverse.
Why a small studio beats a big agency on something like this
I’ll be brutally honest about the commercial pitch; I’ve seen large agencies process this story the way most of the internet did: skim the press release, publish a hot take, and then move on. A one-person studio that actually reads the 30-odd pages of the decision is, on something this intricate, simply better placed, because the value is entirely in the detail that the headlines overlook.
For example, the new complaints process is widely being sold as a way to dispute your rankings. It’s not. It covers genuine market-wide distortion, manual penalties and outright removal from the index, with defined turnarounds for the serious cases. It explicitly does not entertain that old “we slipped below a rival” chestnut. Knowing that difference is the gap between giving a client useful advice and setting them up for disappointment.
What’s more, there’s also a quietly important protection: Google can no longer penalise a site for choosing to opt out of AI Overviews, which now makes that opt-out a real strategic option rather than a risk. These are the things that matter, and they live in the footnotes, not the headlines.
So that’s the deal, really. Not “we saw the news,” but “we read the decision, and here is precisely what it means for your site and your sector.”
What this does not do
It does not force Google to reveal its algorithm, as some have reported, so the work of earning visibility , for now, remains unchanged. Also, it does not give anyone a shortcut. And with the CMA making this move, it applies in the UK only. And the newest AI search features get up to six months before the fairness rules fully apply to them, so the shiniest surfaces are the least settled. Anyone promising you a “CMA-proof AI ranking hack” is selling something that does not exist.
What we are doing about it
We’re dong three things here. We’re baselining client performance now, traffic, rankings and any Google actions, so that if the new complaint routes ever matter, we’ve got the evidence rather than just indignation.
We’re ready for both mid-July and mid-December, when Google’s implementation plan and the requirement itself are due, along with the new public guidance Google has promised on how its results and AI Overviews are assembled, which will be the most useful document to come out of all this.
And, finally, we’re reviewing, client by client, whether opting out of AI Overviews now makes sense, given it can no longer cost you in classic search.
The bottom line
A fairer, more predictable, more accountable Google is good for small businesses, and very good for the ones whose partners read the rules properly. The advantage could be modest but ultimately it’s real, and the spoils go to whoever is proactive rather than reacts to it.
If you would like a straight, jargon-free read on what this means for your website and your market, that is exactly the sort of thing 22i is for. Drop us a line and we will tell you whether there is anything here worth your time, including, quite possibly, “nothing yet, we will keep watching.” Which is itself worth knowing.
