Google’s search rules just changed. Your performance promises did not catch up

What strategic market status actually means

Strategic market status, SMS, is the core designation under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Where the CMA finds a firm holds substantial and entrenched market power in a digital activity, with a position of strategic significance, it can designate that firm and then impose conduct requirements tailored to the specific harm it has identified.

Google was designated for general search and search advertising. That is not a one-off penalty for past conduct. It is a standing regulatory relationship: the CMA can add, vary, or enforce conduct requirements against Google in this market on an ongoing basis, without needing to bring a fresh competition case each time.

The conduct requirement covering fair ranking and data portability was published on 17 June 2026, and the CMA’s official summary of that measure was updated on 4 August 2026. It is currently in force.

What the fair-ranking requirement actually requires

The fair-ranking conduct requirement addresses the long-standing concern that a platform which both runs the marketplace and competes within it can quietly tilt the playing field. In practical terms, it means Google’s search ranking has to apply consistent, non-discriminatory criteria, and cannot be built to prefer Google’s own products, services, or content ahead of competitors for reasons that have nothing to do with relevance or quality.

For a business, this is not an abstract fairness principle. Ranking position is revenue. A change to how fairly, or how differently, ranking now has to work can move traffic, and traffic that was implicitly priced into a commercial arrangement.

What the data-portability requirement actually requires

The companion requirement addresses portability: the ability for advertisers, publishers, and users to take their own performance data, campaign data, and related metrics to competing tools and platforms without unreasonable friction. Historically, one of the quieter forms of platform lock-in has not been the search algorithm itself, but the fact that a business’s own historic performance data was hard to extract, compare, or migrate.

Portability changes that dynamic, at least in principle. It also changes what a business relying on platform-derived data can now reasonably expect, and what a supplier promising to deliver, manage, or benchmark that data should be contractually accountable for.

Why this matters beyond competition law

None of this is competition-law theory if your business sells services that depend, even partially, on search visibility, adtech placement, or platform-derived customer acquisition. Ranking, access to data, and platform dependency can all affect revenue and bargaining position, and a regulatory change to any of them can ripple straight into a commercial relationship you did not draft with this in mind.

The practical risk sits in two places. First, customer contracts that promise an outcome, a lead volume, a visibility level, a campaign result, without qualifying that promise against the reality that delivery ultimately depends on a third-party platform’s behaviour. Second, adtech and martech supplier agreements that are silent on who absorbs the cost when the platform itself changes how it ranks, targets, or shares data.

Commercial teams should map, concretely, which contractual commitments depend on search performance or on portable platform data, before a ranking change or a data-access change turns an operational shift into a breach.

What to check in your contracts now

Start with anything customer-facing that implies certainty about search-dependent outcomes. Then work backwards through your own supplier stack, adtech vendors, martech platforms, agencies managing paid search, to see where the same assumption of stability has been quietly built in.

• Absolute performance promises. Any clause guaranteeing rankings, traffic, leads, or campaign outcomes without qualifying that delivery depends on third-party platform behaviour outside your control.
• Silent risk allocation. Agreements that say nothing about who bears the cost, delay, or disruption caused by a platform-driven ranking or access change.
• Data-access assumptions. Commitments that assume continuous, unchanged availability of platform-derived data, rather than accounting for the fact that access terms can themselves change.
• Undefined “material change” triggers. No mechanism for renegotiation, price adjustment, or termination when the underlying platform changes materially.
• Warranties you cannot actually stand behind. Any warranty that effectively promises platform behaviour rather than your own performance.

What to put in the contract

Adtech and martech agreements should be rebuilt around a simple discipline: describe what your business controls, qualify what it does not, and allocate the risk of platform-driven change explicitly rather than by default.

• Qualify performance commitments against third-party platform behaviour, so a ranking or access change is a defined event, not a breach.
• Allocate responsibility for platform-driven change between supplier and customer, covering disruption, cost, and notice obligations.
• Define data availability terms that reflect the new portability requirement, rather than assuming historic access patterns continue unchanged.
• Build in a review trigger tied to material regulatory or platform change, not just an annual renewal date.
• Keep a record of what you told customers about search-dependent performance, so any dispute is about what was actually promised, not what was assumed.