EU orders Google to share search data with rivals

The European Commission has ordered Google to share anonymised search data with its rivals. The binding decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) were issued on 16 July 2026 — Google must open access to ranking, query, click and view data from both free and paid results.

The regulator rejected Google's initial offer: it stripped out 90–100% of unique queries and ignored AI chatbots. Now search engines and AI services will be able to request the data, subject to privacy limits.

• What is shared: queries, metadata (language, device type), viewed URLs, positions and interaction patterns;
• What is excluded: accounts, search history, precise timestamps and location, rare queries, ad clicks;
• Who qualifies: a search engine active in the EU for 2+ years, or a startup under 2 years old with €50M+ raised, and 50,000+ monthly users;
• Key dates: forms in August 2026, dataset by November 2026, sharing starts January 2027.

According to PPC Land, the data can be used to improve ranking, autocomplete and real-time retrieval for AI chatbots, but training general-purpose AI models and building ad tools is prohibited. Google's EU search share exceeds 90%.

If rivals and AI services get access to real search behaviour data, the quality of alternative systems could rise noticeably — and so will traffic fragmentation. Rare queries and ad clicks stay outside the dataset, though, so the signals that matter most for SEO will remain Google's alone.

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