Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince flew from to London last week and met with the U.K.’s regulator, Competition Markets Authority (CMA) — the one that just gave Google “Strategic Market Status.” That means the regulator can investigate beyond search and ads to cover Google features like AI Overviews, AI Mode, Discover, Top Stories, and the News tab.
Prince’s goal: to prove why Google must completely separate its AI and search crawlers — now a major point of friction for publishers. Google technically separates its search crawler (Googlebot) and its AI crawler (Google-Extended), but in practice, they overlap. Even if a publisher blocks Google-Extended, their content can still show up in AI Overviews, because those are tied to Google Search.
In response to the CMA’s move, Google has stated that heavy-handed measures could slow AI-era product launches, raise business costs, and undermine a service it claims added £118 billion ($157 billion) to the U.K. economy in 2023.
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