The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority published a revised version of its user choice proposals for Google on 23 September, and the substantive change is who is allowed on the list. Under the new draft, AI assistants that meet the regulator’s technical and security requirements can appear on the search choice screen alongside conventional search engines.
The underlying requirement is unchanged: Google would have to present Android and Chrome users with a choice of search services when they first use the device or browser, and then prompt them again each year. What the CMA has rewritten is the eligibility test, which until now assumed the thing being chosen was a search engine.
“The way people search for information online is changing, with new services creating fresh opportunities for innovation and competition,” Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s chief executive, said.
Why this is the awkward one
This is the last outstanding piece of the package the CMA proposed in January. The regulator designated Google with strategic market status in general search and search advertising in October 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and has since imposed requirements on publisher controls over AI features and on fair ranking and data portability.
A choice screen is the hardest of those to design, because it has to define the category it is offering a choice within. Assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are named in the CMA’s own framing as the kind of service that could now qualify — products that answer a question rather than return a page of links, and that are not substitutes for a search engine in any strict sense. The revised draft also asks that providers on the screen properly attribute publisher content, which is the same concern the CMA has been pursuing separately in its AI overviews work.
The remedy’s real weakness
Choice screens have a history. The European Commission required one of Google in 2019 after the Android antitrust decision, and the measured effect on search market share was small. An annual re-prompt is stronger than a one-off screen, and a list that includes assistants offers something genuinely different rather than five near-identical search boxes. Whether that changes behaviour at scale is an empirical question nobody can answer from the draft.
What happens next
Comments on the revised conduct requirement close on 9 October, and the CMA expects to reach a final decision by the end of 2026. The details worth reading when it lands are the eligibility thresholds — what an assistant must demonstrate on security and technical grounds to earn a place — and whether the annual prompt survives into the final version, since that is the part Google has the clearest reason to resist.
