UOKiK's charges against Google and a lesson for companies dependent on search

UOKiK has brought charges against four Google companies over the way they negotiated with Polish publishers. Formally, it is a dispute between the media and a platform, but it affects every company whose traffic and sales depend on a single search engine.

More and more Google searches end without a click. A user is satisfied with an article snippet in the results, a tile in Google News, or a summary prepared by artificial intelligence. Ads displayed next to this content generate revenue for the platform. The author of the text loses visits, and with them revenue from ads, subscriptions, or sales inquiries.

Press publishers have a legal tool in this situation that companies running content marketing (publishing their own content to win customers) cannot use. That is exactly why it is worth following how this tool works in practice. UOKiK's proceedings show the cost of depending on a single traffic intermediary, even when the law is on the side of the content creator.

What UOKiK is accusing Google of

On Monday, 5 October 2026, the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, Tomasz Chróstny, brought charges against four companies: Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited and Google Poland. The basis is the prohibition of abuse of a dominant position under Article 9 of the Act on Competition and Consumer Protection and Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The case covers Google Search, Google News and Google Discover, the user-tailored set of news shown on phones.

The authority makes two accusations: imposing unfair terms on publishers for the use of their materials and obstructing negotiations over remuneration. UOKiK is not assessing the level of the rates themselves, and the essence of the accusations is information asymmetry. According to UOKiK, Google proposed amounts but did not provide the data required by law: how it uses the publications, how much it earns from them, and how it calculated the offer. Publishers therefore could not verify whether the proposal was fair or present their own, numbers-based one.

Abuse of a dominant position may result in a fine of up to 10 percent of turnover. However, UOKiK does not determine how much Google should pay. If the parties do not reach an agreement, the amount of remuneration may be set by a ruling of the President of the Office of Electronic Communications (UKE).

Google Poland responds that it is analyzing the charges and that after the Polish regulations came into force, it actively participated in negotiations. In a statement, the company's press office wrote:

The company says it has licensing agreements with more than 5,500 European news services. The number of agreements concluded in Poland differs depending on the reports, so we do not cite it.

The law has been in place since 2024, but the money is still not there

Publishers' right to remuneration for article snippets shown by platforms stems from EU Directive 2019/790, known as the DSM Directive. Poland implemented it through an amendment to copyright law in 2024, as the last country in the Union. Some publishers are therefore seeking compensation from the State Treasury.

After that, things were only slightly better. Mediation between the Association of Digital Publishers Employers (ZPWC) and Google before the President of UKE started on 27 May 2026 and ended without agreement after 60 days, on 4 August. ZPWC President Maciej Kossowski said the parties failed to agree either on the terms of use of the publications or on the amount of remuneration. In May, the Repropol organization also ended mediation without a settlement. Both organizations asked UKE to set the rates, and ZPWC filed its application on 31 August.

The amount at stake is high. According to a study published in January 2026, the amount owed by Google to Polish publishers could reach as much as PLN 514 million per year. This is an estimate, not a calculation based on Google's data, because that is exactly what is missing.

France went through this earlier

France was the first to implement the directive, and its story shows how long this kind of enforcement takes. In 2020, the French competition authority (Autorité de la concurrence) ordered Google to negotiate with publishers in good faith. In 2021, it fined the company EUR 500 million (about PLN 2.1 billion) for failing to conduct such negotiations. In 2022, Google signed agreements with 450 French publishers, and in 2024 it received another fine, EUR 250 million, for failing to comply with the arrangements.

The dispute did not end with the fines. French publishers complain that automatic AI summaries violate the 2022 agreements, and SEPM, an organization representing around 500 press companies, referred the dispute to the International Chamber of Commerce after the agreement expired. At the same time, since 9 December 2025, the European Commission has been examining whether Google uses publishers' content in AI Overviews (AI summaries above search results) and AI Mode (a search mode in the form of a conversation with AI) without remuneration and without a real possibility to object. This proceeding is independent of the Polish one and has a different scope.

The conclusion from the comparison: a fine does not end the problem. Even after fines reaching hundreds of millions of euros and signed agreements, French publishers are still negotiating again because Google's product itself is changing.

What this means for companies using content marketing

Companies publishing guides, blogs and knowledge bases are not entitled to the remuneration granted to press publishers. But they face the same traffic problem. A Senuto study covering 1,435 Polish domains found that in June 2025, the number of clicks from Polish Google fell by 19.4 percent year on year, even though impressions were 3.3 percent higher. AI summaries then appeared for one in four queries.

A randomized experiment conducted at the beginning of 2026 on 1,065 Chrome users showed that when an AI summary appears, there are 39.8 percent fewer organic clicks. Ad clicks did not change. Studies differ in method and scope, so these figures should not be compared one-to-one, but the direction is the same. Media leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute expect search traffic to fall by 43 percent over three years.

The most important lesson from UOKiK's charges concerns information. Publishers with a statutory right to data do not know how much their content is worth to Google. A company without such a right knows even less. In our view, a sensible distribution strategy therefore involves several steps:

• regularly measure how much of traffic and sales comes from the search engine,
• treat impressions without clicks as a signal, not a success,
• build owned channels such as a newsletter or a customer community,
• write content specific enough to be cited in AI summaries.

The last point is supported by data: in the cited experiment, brands mentioned in the AI summary received 35 percent more organic clicks than those omitted. However, this does not replace diversification. UOKiK's proceedings will continue, the UKE decision on the rates is expected no earlier than 2027, and France shows that even a won dispute has to be fought again. Companies waiting for regulators to restore former search traffic may be waiting for years.