If AI search uses the work, the link has to survive.

In June 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google’s search services in the United Kingdom. The regulator said publishers would receive effective tools to stop their content being used to power AI features in search, including AI Overviews, and that Google must ensure publisher content is properly attributed with clear links in AI-generated results.

That is not merely a publisher dispute. A link is provenance for a reader: it shows where a claim came from, whose judgement shaped it and where the evidence can be checked. When the answer box becomes the destination, attribution is the minimum required to keep search from becoming a one-way extraction system.

A citation is not decoration

The CMA says the new requirement is intended to support fair dealing, open choices, trust and transparency. It also says Google must let publishers opt out of use of their content for fine-tuning AI models. Those controls do not settle the commercial question, but they make an important distinction: crawling a public page does not automatically settle every future use of the work.

For readers, good AI search should make sources easier to inspect, not harder to locate. A system that sounds confident while hiding the path back to the reporting has made itself convenient by making the underlying work invisible.