TL;DR

On Wednesday the CMA, the UK competition regulator, proposed letting AI assistants like Perplexity and ChatGPT onto the choice screens Google shows UK users. City AM now reports that no assistant is guaranteed a place. The regulator has yet to decide what an eligible AI provider looks like, and it is consulting until 9 October.

What the CMA has proposed

Under the wider plans, Google would have to offer UK users a choice of search service when they first use Chrome or start up a new Android handset, and prompt them again every year. Until now those screens have listed conventional search engines. The CMA wants to add AI assistants “where they meet the relevant criteria”, with technical and security tests among the conditions under discussion.

Someone with knowledge of the proposals told City AM this does not mean assistants will appear automatically. The regulator first has to define eligibility, and each service must then qualify.

Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s chief executive, said people are “increasingly using” AI assistants to search, yet those tools are missing from Google’s screens. Google would not comment.

A condition publishers will welcome

One proposed rule matters beyond the assistants themselves. Any provider shown on the screen would have to credit publisher content it draws on clearly and accurately, so that users can find and open the original source.

This builds on earlier CMA action. In June the regulator ordered Google to let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without losing search ranking. Both measures rest on Google’s “strategic market status” in search, which lets the CMA set conduct rules for the company. The attribution condition would extend the same concern about publishers to Google’s AI rivals.

Looking forward

The regulator aims to settle the rules before 2027. The eligibility criteria will decide who benefits. Strict security and technical bars could favour large, well-resourced assistants and leave smaller entrants off the screen. For UK businesses that rely on search traffic, the attribution rule may matter more than which logos appear. That condition, if it survives consultation, would oblige any assistant that wins a place on the screen to send users back to the sites it draws from.