If you run a Malaysian website, online shop, or blog, the way Google shows your content is quietly changing. A decision in London this week just handed British publishers a set of controls that Malaysian site owners do not have.
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Kai T chevron_right
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What the UK ordered
On 3 June, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered Google to put clearer attribution and visible links to publishers inside its AI-generated search features, and to let publishers opt out of having their content fed into tools like AI Overviews. As reported by Ars Technica, the regulator also said Google cannot punish sites that opt out by pushing them down in normal search results. Google has nine months to comply, must file an implementation plan within a month, and has to publish regular compliance reports. The CMA could act because it had earlier ruled that Google holds what it calls strategic market status in general search.
Google said it will comply and has started testing a new toggle in Search Console that lets website owners decide whether their pages help power its AI search features. Sites that opt out receive no traffic or impressions from those features. The catch for everyone outside Britain: Google confirmed that extra links apply globally, but would not say whether the UK-mandated attribution and opt-out controls will reach every country, and the Search Console changes are going to a subset of UK site owners first. In its own filing, Google argued against the rules, telling the CMA that "excessive attribution of lots of sources may worsen the user experience."
Why this matters for Malaysian publishers
This is not an abstract European fight. AI Overviews now appear for Malaysian searchers, including in Malay, after Google expanded the feature to more than 200 countries and over 40 languages. The traffic effect is already measurable. Google referral traffic to publishers worldwide fell by roughly a third in the year to November 2025, according to Press Gazette, and a February 2026 Ahrefs study found AI Overviews line up with a 58 percent drop in click-through rates for top-ranking pages. Around one in five publishers expect to lose more than 75 percent of their search traffic, and about a third say they will block AI Overviews outright.
Malaysian sites feel the same pull on their traffic, but without the lever the UK just created. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission's new deeming provision, which treats large social media and messaging platforms as licensed from 1 January 2026, is aimed at online safety and accountability, not at search attribution or fair pay for content. The Online Safety Act 2025 and the Competition Act enforced by MyCC do not reach this either, and online publishing largely sits outside the existing licensing rules. For now, a Malaysian publisher's only real say over how Google's AI uses its work depends on whether, and when, Google extends these controls beyond the UK.
What Malaysian site owners can do now
A few moves are worth making before any global rollout. Watch Search Console for the new generative-AI toggle, and weigh it carefully, because opting out is blunt: it removes a site from AI features entirely, including any traffic those features still send. Treat the new data Google is adding, impressions plus which pages appear in AI answers and in which countries, as a planning tool once it arrives. And keep writing for citation, since clear, factual, well-attributed pages are the ones AI search engines quote and link. That is the closest thing to insurance while the rules stay uneven across borders.
The UK has shown that publishers can win real control over how their content feeds AI search. The open question for Malaysia is whether that control arrives by regulation, by Google's own choice, or not at all.
Images courtesy of Nathana Rebouças and Philip Strong on Unsplash.