The EU has told Google what it must do to share search data with rivals

The European Commission today sent Google its preliminary findings under the Digital Markets Act, proposing six specific measures governing how Google must share search ranking, query, click, and view data with competing search engines.

AI chatbots with search functionalities are explicitly included as potential data beneficiaries. A public consultation opens tomorrow.

The European Commission has sent Google its preliminary findings under the Digital Markets Act, proposing concrete measures to govern how Google must share search data with third-party search engines and, critically, with AI chatbots that carry search functionalities.

The findings, published on 16 April 2026, set out six specific areas of obligation and open a public consultation on Friday 17 April to allow third parties, including Google’s competitors and their representatives, to comment on the proposed measures before they are finalised.

The six areas covered by the Commission’s proposed measures are: the eligibility of “data beneficiaries” to receive search data, including the contested question of whether AI chatbots with search functionalities qualify; the scope of the search data Google must share; the means and frequency by which data must be shared; measures to ensure proper anonymisation of personal data; parameters for setting fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory prices for the data; and the governance processes by which beneficiaries access it.

The combination of pricing parameters and access governance is particularly significant: Brussels is not merely mandating that data be shared but specifying in some detail how the commercial and technical terms of access should work.

The AI chatbot eligibility question is the most commercially consequential element of the package.

Google Search holds decades of accumulated user behaviour data, what queries people enter, which results they click, which they skip, how they reformulate searches when they do not find what they want, that its rivals have historically been unable to replicate at scale.

Traditional search competitors including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia have argued this asymmetry is a structural barrier to meaningful competition.

The DMA’s Article 6(11) obligation, which these proceedings are designed to specify, requires access on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, but until now the precise scope of who qualifies has remained undefined.

By explicitly including AI chatbots with search functionalities in the proposed measures, the Commission is signalling that it regards conversational AI systems that answer queries directly as competing in the same space as traditional search engines and therefore entitled to the same data access rights.

The preliminary findings represent the midpoint of specification proceedings launched on 27 January 2026. The Commission opened those proceedings, a relatively new enforcement mechanism under the DMA designed to define how a gatekeeper must comply with a specific obligation rather than immediately finding it in breach, after determining that Google’s existing data-sharing arrangements were insufficient to deliver meaningful competition.

The Commission must finalise the proceedings within six months of their January opening, placing the deadline around late July 2026. Google now has the opportunity to respond to the preliminary findings in writing before final measures are adopted.

The proceedings do not constitute a finding of non-compliance, but they create the legal architecture for one. If Google fails to satisfy the measures the Commission ultimately adopts, the regulator retains the power to open a formal non-compliance decision, carrying fines of up to 10% of Alphabet’s global annual turnover, a figure that given Alphabet’s revenues could exceed $35 billion.

Google’s response to the January launch was sceptical: Clare Kelly, the company’s senior competition counsel, said the company was “alcady licensing Search data to competitors under the DMA” and warned that further requirements “offered driven by competitor grievances rather than the interests of consumers” would compromise privacy, security, and innovation.

The Commission’s counter-position, expressed by EVP Teresa Ribera, is that access to genuinely useful data is necessary to “maximise the potential and the benefits of this profound technological shift by making sure the playing field is open and fair.”

Today’s action is one of several simultaneous DMA enforcement tracks against Google. A parallel set of specification proceedings addresses Google’s Android interoperability obligations, requiring that third-party AI service providers receive equally effective access to the same Android hardware and software features that power Gemini.

Separate from these specification proceedings, the Commission issued preliminary findings in March 2025 alleging that Google Search unlawfully self-preferences its own vertical services, Google Shopping, Hotels, and Flightsm, a non-compliance track that carries its own fine exposure and is proceeding in parallel.