The Context
On 10 October 2025, the CMA published its 156-page Final SMS Designation Decision. Google now holds Strategic Market Status for general search and search advertising under the DMCCA 2024. The arithmetic is brutal. UK businesses spent an amount equivalent to £33,000 per advertiser on Google search advertising last year. The CMA’s provisional finding, published 24 June 2025, was blunt: Google “may not consistently provide fair search ranking and is able to rapidly (and with limited transparency over when or why) introduce changes to ranking and presentation of results which affect businesses’ ability to reach customers.” That is not a suggestion. It is a quantified governance gap. The regulator has already published a roadmap of conduct requirements targeting fair ranking, choice screens, publisher controls for AI Overviews, and data portability. The clock is ticking, and the penalty clock ticks at 10% of global turnover.
The Risk
Directors must read the DMCCA’s enforcement provisions with cold precision. The Act empowers the CMA to impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover for breach of conduct requirements. For Google, that number is in the billions. But the personal liability hook is narrower, and sharper. Under Part 1, Chapter 8, the CMA can compel information and interview senior managers. Criminal liability attaches for supplying false or misleading information, or for destroying or falsifying documents. The Companies Act 2006 duty of reasonable care and skill means a board that fails to implement a documented compliance framework for the CMA’s published conduct requirements—fair ranking, publisher controls, data portability—has created an audit trail of its own failure. The CMA has put directors on notice. The root cause is not a single algorithm change. It is the systemic absence of transparent, auditable processes for ranking changes that affect millions of UK businesses. That gap is now a legal liability.
The Control
The solution is not a PR campaign. It is a forensic compliance architecture. Your board must commission an independent audit of all ranking and presentation changes affecting UK businesses over the past 24 months. Map every algorithm update to a documented impact assessment. Establish a named senior officer responsible for CMA compliance certifications. Build a real-time dashboard that tracks compliance with the CMA’s expected fair ranking, choice screen, and publisher control obligations. The regulator expects proactive governance, not reactive remediation. The cost of building that system is trivial compared to 10% of global turnover.
The Challenge
These are the critical questions you should be raising at the board table:
| What is the specific dollar value of UK search advertising revenue that depends on ranking practices the CMA has already identified as opaque and potentially unfair? | |
| Who on the board is personally certifying that our compliance framework meets the CMA’s published fair ranking and publisher control requirements, and what is their documented evidence of that certification? | |
| If the CMA exercises its power to interview senior managers tomorrow, does the board have a defensible, time-stamped audit trail of every ranking change and its impact on UK businesses, or is that trail a gap that will be read as a failure of duty? |