Web strategy in the AI era has a strange shape. You spend your days optimizing for systems nobody will let you look inside. You publish, you watch the traffic move, and when an AI answer surfaces a competitor instead of you, there is no panel that explains why. So when a regulator forces one of these systems to show its work, the question gets concrete: What actually changes for the people who build websites? After reading the order, the honest answer is two things at once. The recourse is real and worth taking seriously. The work it points to is not new.
A Regulator Is Forcing Google To Explain How It Ranks
On June 17, the UK Competition and Markets Authority used Google’s Strategic Market Status designation, granted last October on the basis that Google handles more than 90% of UK search, to impose two binding rules. The first matters to anyone with a website. Google has to rank organic results by “objective and non-discriminatory criteria,” and the regulator wrote that this applies inside AI Overviews, not only the 10 blue links. Google also has to give businesses real transparency into how ranking works, advance notice before major changes to its ranking systems, and a documented process to raise complaints. It has six months. “Step by step, we’re ensuring that Google’s search services work better for businesses and consumers across the UK,” said Will Hayter, the CMA’s executive director for digital markets.
For 25 years, the ranking system was something you inferred from the outside, never something you could question from the inside. Advance notice of changes and a real complaints process is recourse web professionals have never had, and “objective criteria” is a promise that the unexplained demotion has to end. It is UK-only for now, Google will contest it, and nothing is live for six months. But rules like this rarely stay in one country, and the direction is not ambiguous. The layer that decides whether your website is seen might end up being exposed.
Opening The Box Would Change Less Than You Hope
Now run the thought experiment all the way. Say the order goes further than anyone expects, and you could read the exact criteria that decide what gets surfaced and cited, across every engine, not only Google. What would you actually do differently?
You would probably change less than the excitement suggests. Transparency would settle many arguments, sure. It would end the seasonal debate over whether llms.txt does anything (the latest large-scale data says it does not), whether schema markup is a citation cheat code (a controlled study says it is not), whether stuffing a page with “best in class” claims earns the recommendation (it earns the citation and loses the recommendation to the competitors you named). Seeing the rubric would kill the folklore. It would not change the work. A system reading your website still has to find the answer, parse it cleanly, and have some reason to trust it. Whether you can see the…
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