Turkey Opens an Antitrust Probe Into Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Immediately Imposes an Interim Rule on Publisher Content

Turkey's Competition Authority has opened an antitrust investigation into the AI features of Google Search — and unlike most probes of this kind, it moved immediately to restrict the conduct it is examining. In an announcement on November 2, the authority said it will investigate whether Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode violate Turkey's Competition Protection Law.

The investigation covers five questions: how the two AI features change the way users obtain information; whether they harm traffic to news publishers and other content creators; whether Google's content-use agreements with publishers contain unfair contractual terms; whether the features create exclusionary effects against publishers, other content creators, and AI chatbot services; and whether Google discriminates when selecting or licensing publisher content as source material for its AI answers.

The more unusual step is the interim measure. The authority said existing indications suggest Google's search AI features are highly likely to involve exclusionary and exploitative conduct toward news publishers, so it imposed a binding interim regulatory measure on Google while the investigation proceeds. Under it, Google must ensure its terms for using news content are non-discriminatory and reflect the content's economic value, must let publishers decide freely whether to authorize AI use of their content, and must not use an authorization decision to affect how those publishers are displayed or indexed in Google's other services.

Turkey is acting where private litigation has so far failed. In the United States, a federal judge in October dismissed antitrust suits over AI Overviews brought by Chegg and Penske Media, while the European Union continues to press Google over how its AI features use publisher content without paying for it. Turkey's move is the first time a national competition authority has paired an AI Overviews investigation with an immediate conduct remedy aimed squarely at the publisher-content pipeline.

The structural issue the authority is targeting is the one publishers worldwide have been articulating all year: AI Overviews answer the user's question directly on Google's own page, so the click that once funded the journalism never happens, while the content that produced the answer was indexed for free. Forcing Google to price that content — and to let publishers say no without retaliation — would, if enforced and copied elsewhere, change the economics of AI search.

What it means: AI search is entering its regulatory phase. If a mid-sized market like Turkey can impose binding interim conduct rules on AI Overviews, larger regulators with existing Google abuse cases — Brussels above all — have a ready-made template. For Google, the cost of answering every query with generated AI text is no longer just engineering; it is a licensing bill and a compliance regime that grows with every market that follows Ankara's lead.