Google Search conduct requirements: which publisher controls a restaurant can use

The direct answer, before the detail. These obligations are enforceable against Google. Not one binds your restaurant, none gives it a claim, and most are not live yet. But the outer deadline is not a waiting period: the CMA has said it expects important parts of the controls to arrive well before it. Do not assume a control exists for your site, and do not assume it is absent. Go and look.

The principle underneath is older than any regulator. Controls of this kind attach to content somebody publishes and can configure, because a publisher has a site: a robots file, pages, a markup layer, an owner who can change all three. Whatever share of your presence lives inside somebody else's listing is a share these remedies were never built to reach. Publish on your own site and you sit inside the category the rules describe. Stay entirely inside somebody else's and you are the content rather than the publisher.

Start with the thing that annoys you, because it is the thing the regulator eventually described. A guest searches the restaurant by name, or a dish, or a cuisine and a postcode. What loads first is not a list of links. It is generated text assembled from material published elsewhere, and it often answers well enough that the guest goes no further. A search that used to end on your menu page now ends with nothing to click.

The CMA framed this around publishers rather than restaurants, but the mechanism is identical. Its 3 June 2026 announcement says that, in a world first, "publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews." That sentence assumes content, an identifiable owner, and a technical surface a tool can act on. A restaurant whose menu, hours and description exist only inside a third-party profile holds none of the three in its own name.

It is also why the problem gets misdiagnosed. Missing from ordinary results is usually a technical fault, a more fixable investigation into why a restaurant website is not showing on Google. AI Overviews are a different shape: the page can be perfectly findable and still lose the visit, because the answer arrived before the list did.

The measure dates it: "3 June 2026: Following the CMA's decision to designate Google as having strategic market status in respect of general search services". Designation is the gate that makes everything afterwards enforceable, and it is a status conferred on Google, not a protection conferred on you.

Two obligations sit inside the publisher conduct requirement. Google must "provide publishers with effective controls over the use of their search content in generative AI", and must "take reasonable steps to ensure that search content is attributed clearly and accurately in general search". The announcement adds a third strand: Google "will now also have to allow publishers to opt-out of allowing their content to be used for the 'fine-tuning' of AI models."

Three things follow. Every duty runs from Google to publishers, so your position depends on whether you publish anything. The obligations concern control and credit rather than placement, so none promises a ranking. And "reasonable steps" is a standard to be met, not a result guaranteed.

Take that first obligation on its own terms. A control surface has to attach to something, and controls of this shape attach to a site: the pages at a domain, the directives it serves, the settings an owner changes.

Now apply it. If the full menu lives on the restaurant's own domain, that content is a candidate for whatever the control turns out to be, because there is a site, an owner and somewhere to configure. If the fullest description of the food lives inside a marketplace listing or a directory page, the platform is the publisher, and the restaurant holds none of the levers.

A control you cannot reach is not a control. Ask of every piece of information a guest needs not whether it exists online, but whether you could configure it if a control appeared tomorrow.

The second obligation has the most direct commercial reading. Google is "now required to make sure that publisher content is properly attributed, using clear links, in AI-generated search results".

Attribution with a clear link is, in commercial terms, a route back. If a generated answer describes your tasting menu and links to the page describing it, the guest has somewhere to go, and that somewhere can be your own booking page rather than one charging you for the same guest. Ownership decides how much of that value you collect, because attribution points at the source. If the source is a directory entry, the clear link goes to the directory.

Note the limits. It is no guarantee of appearing in a generated answer, no preference for your page over anyone else's, and it promises a ranking to nobody.

On 17 June 2026 the CMA added the requirement aimed at businesses rather than publishers. It reported that "UK businesses rely on Google search to reach customers but have told the CMA that current ranking practices are neither fair nor transparent", and required Google to "Rank 'organic' search results using objective and non-discriminatory criteria (including in AI Overviews but not sponsored results)" and to "Introduce clear processes for businesses to raise concerns about how Google ranks results and have them addressed effectively". The measure adds a transparency limb: Google must "provide transparency over how it ranks organic search results, and provide sufficient notice and information about material changes that could affect publishers and reduce avoidable costs".

A restaurant is one of those UK businesses, so this comes closest to your door. Objective and non-discriminatory criteria is a rule about how criteria are applied, not an entitlement to a position, and the CMA has promised no restaurant a ranking outcome. The usable part is the second half: a process for raising a concern.

Then there is the timing, which most summaries leave out and which the measures themselves never state. Both runways sit on the CMA's announcements. Of the 3 June package: "It will have nine months to implement all changes but the CMA expects important parts of the controls to become available to publishers well before that deadline." Read both halves. Nine months is an outer bound, not a date before which nothing appears, so the honest position is neither that the controls are there nor that they are absent. Of the 17 June package: "Google has 6 months to implement the fair ranking requirement, and 3 months for the data portability requirement." That names a third remedy, data portability, on the nearest of the three deadlines. The announcement does not describe its scope, so treat it as a date to watch rather than a control to plan around.

Caption: Every row binds Google rather than the restaurant, none of it promises a ranking to any business, and the nine-month figure is an outer bound for all changes, with the CMA saying it expects important parts of the controls to reach publishers well before that deadline.

Put the two halves together and the boundary is sharp. That is reasoning from the structure of the remedies, not something the CMA has said about businesses with no site of their own. The publisher obligations give control and credit to whoever publishes. Fair ranking gives businesses a standard and a route for raising concerns. Neither lets a restaurant reach inside a page it does not hold and change how it behaves.

Picture the realistic arrangement: hours in one platform, menu in another, photography in a third, a booking flow on a marketplace, a website untouched since launch. Most of what a generated answer could say comes from surfaces the restaurant does not administer. When a publisher control ships, the party who presses it holds the site.

There is no legal problem here for the restaurant and no compliance task. There is a commercial one, and it can be settled today.

Run this on a phone in a quiet half hour. It is a stocktake of ownership, not a fix for the regulation.

Everything above converges on one precondition. Publisher controls and attribution only reach content the restaurant owns and can configure, which is the case for an owned restaurant site rather than a platform listing.

TableSpark exists to put a restaurant on that side of the line. Menu, hours, special dates, allergen detail and the booking or ordering route sit on a site at the restaurant's own domain with managed SSL, and the owner edits them directly. The foundation a search engine needs in order to read those pages as a restaurant comes with the site: crawlable structured restaurant content, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema, internal linking, mobile-first output and managed search-verification setup.

Be exact about the division. Google alone decides crawling, indexing and rankings, and that is true of every provider in this market. A restaurant controls something narrower: whether the content sits at an address it holds, and whether the person who needs to change a sentence can.

The proof is deliberately ordinary. A dish opens in the TableSpark menu editor as a structured record, the same dish renders on the live guest page at the restaurant's own domain, and the special dates the owner set appear in the published schema. Each state sits at an address the restaurant owns and can configure.

Price the ownership question rather than the regulation, because the regulation arrives on its own schedule and ownership is settled the week you decide it. Starter is £19 per month, Growth £39 and Full £69, all excluding VAT. There is 0% TableSpark commission on bookings and orders, and Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. What that buys is the position this article has been circling: pages the restaurant holds, a structure it can configure, a direct booking route that keeps the guest out of somebody else's hands. Weighed on what an independent UK restaurant receives for the money, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall restaurant-website choice open to it.