Regulation & Policy
Competition and Markets Authority
Also known as: CMA, UK Competition and Markets Authority
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the United Kingdom's competition and consumer protection regulator. It investigates mergers, anti-competitive conduct and market practices, and it holds specific powers over large digital firms under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Its decisions shape how search engines, app stores and AI assistants operate in the UK market.
What it is
The CMA is a non-ministerial UK government department that enforces competition and consumer law. Alongside its general merger and antitrust work, it runs a digital markets regime that allows it to designate firms with strategic market status in particular activities and then impose conduct requirements on them. It also publishes market studies, including work on foundation models and cloud services.
Why it matters
Search and AI assistant behaviour in the UK is partly set by regulation rather than by product teams alone. Remedies such as choice screens, default arrangements, data access rules or publisher terms can change where traffic goes and what obligations platforms have towards the sites they crawl and summarise. For marketers, CMA activity is an early indicator of shifts in referral patterns, ad auction rules and content licensing norms.
How it works
The CMA opens investigations or market studies, gathers evidence from firms and third parties, consults publicly, then issues findings and remedies that can be legally binding. Interested parties, including publishers and trade bodies, submit responses that feed into the record. Practitioners track consultations and decision documents, respond where their business is affected, and translate confirmed remedies into forecasting and channel planning assumptions.
When it applies
It applies whenever your business depends on UK traffic or ad spend flowing through large digital platforms, or when you are considering a merger or a commercial practice that may raise competition or consumer law questions.
Examples
- A publisher submits evidence to a CMA consultation about how AI summaries affect referral traffic to news sites.
- A retailer reviews CMA decisions on general search to understand whether default and choice screen changes could shift UK query volume.
- An in-house legal team checks CMA consumer protection guidance before launching a subscription with automatic renewal.
How it is measured
- Share of UK sessions arriving from each search engine or assistant, tracked before and after a remedy takes effect
- Number of relevant CMA consultations responded to, and whether points raised appear in published findings
- Change in UK paid search CPCs and impression share following platform conduct changes
- Time from a published CMA decision to an internal channel forecast update
Insights on Competition and Markets Authority
Related terms in Regulation & Policy
- AI complianceAI compliance is the work of making sure AI systems meet the laws, regulations, standards and internal policies that apply to them. It spans data protection, transparency, risk classification, documentation, human oversight and record keeping across the life of a system. In practice it combines legal interpretation, engineering controls and ongoing evidence gathering.
- AI governanceAI governance is the set of policies, roles, controls and review processes an organisation uses to manage how AI systems are built, bought and used. It covers risk assessment, documentation, human oversight, data handling and accountability. It applies both to AI a company develops and to third-party AI tools used by staff.
- AI privacyAI privacy is the set of practices, rights and obligations that govern how personal data is collected, used, stored and exposed when building or using AI systems. It covers training data, prompts and outputs, retention by AI vendors, and the transparency and control offered to the people whose data is involved. For marketing teams it shapes what customer data can safely be put into AI tools and what must be disclosed.
- AI safetyAI safety is the practice of designing, testing and operating AI systems so they cause less harm, behave predictably and resist misuse. It covers alignment with intended behaviour, evaluation and red teaming, content guardrails, and monitoring once a system is live. For marketers it shapes what models will say, how assistants handle brands, and what compliance teams expect before AI tools go into production.
- AI transparencyAI transparency is the practice of making clear how an AI system works, what sits behind it, and when content or an interaction involves AI. It covers regulatory disclosure duties as well as voluntary explanations such as model cards, labels on synthetic media and citations in AI generated answers. For publishers and marketers it sets expectations about when AI involvement should be declared and how clearly.
- Content licensingContent licensing is the practice of granting an AI company or platform permission to use your published material, usually for model training, retrieval or display inside an assistant, in return for payment or other terms. Deals set out what content is covered, how it can be used, how it is attributed and for how long. It is the commercial alternative to relying only on crawler blocking or copyright enforcement.
Primary research · August 2026
How ChatGPT Shortlists Software Brands
An audit across 10 categories and 60 buying questions. I recorded what ChatGPT reads, throws away and links to when a buyer asks it which software to buy, and what that decides.
- 60
- Questions asked
- 10
- Software markets
- 2,680
- Results read
- 367
- Links shown
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