Google stops demoting EU publishers under its spam policy from Sunday

From Sunday, a European news publisher that runs sponsored content on its site will no longer be at risk of a manual demotion in Google Search. Google confirmed the change on Friday, and Reuters reported that it is designed to settle a European Commission investigation that could otherwise have ended in a fine.

The company said manual actions demoting sites would stop applying to users in the 27 EU countries, along with Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, from 30 August. The policy itself is unchanged in the rest of the world, which means the same page can now rank differently depending on where the person searching happens to be sitting.

At issue is Google’s site reputation abuse policy, introduced in March 2024 and widened in November. It targets what the search industry calls parasite SEO, the practice of parking third-party content on an established domain so that the content inherits the host’s authority in search results.

Publishers have argued for the better part of two years that the enforcement caught the wrong people. Sponsored sections, affiliate reviews and commercial partnerships are ordinary revenue lines for a news organisation, and a manual demotion could remove one of them from search almost overnight.

The Commission agreed that this was a problem worth investigating. It opened a case on 12 November 2025 under the Digital Markets Act, examining whether the policy demoted publishers for a legitimate way of making money.

Google called the investigation misguided at the time, and it has not softened its view of the underlying behaviour. “Our priority is to keep Search results helpful and useful for users and protect them from deceptive practices like ‘parasite SEO’ spam that undermine the web,” a spokesperson told Reuters.

What has changed is the enforcement mechanism rather than the principle. Manual actions are the ones a human reviewer applies to a specific site, and they are the ones publishers complained about most loudly, because they arrive as a discrete penalty on a named domain.

The stakes explain the speed, as a DMA breach carries fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual turnover, which for Alphabet is a number large enough to make a policy carve-out look cheap.

Google had already signalled it would move. It filed a remedies package with the Commission in May, offering to change how the policy applied to news domains and to make its effect on publisher pages more visible, although the full terms were never published.

Friday’s announcement is the first time the shape of that offer has been visible from the outside. It is also narrower than some publishers hoped, since it addresses manual demotions rather than the algorithmic systems that do most of the ranking work day to day.

Whether that satisfies Brussels is still an open question, and the Commission has not said. Regulators can accept commitments, demand more, or press on to a formal finding, and nothing in Google’s statement forecloses any of those routes.

For search professionals, the practical consequence is a genuinely split rulebook. Advice on parasite SEO now has to specify a jurisdiction, and a compliance decision made in Dublin will not necessarily hold in New York.

For publishers, the relief is real but bounded. The revenue line that the policy threatened is safe from one particular kind of penalty in one particular region, which is not the same as knowing where a page will rank next month.

There is also a precedent here that neither side seems keen to spell out. A gatekeeper able to switch off an enforcement mechanism for one region at two days’ notice has shown that the mechanism was always discretionary.

Alphabet has been here before, most memorably with the €2.4bn shopping fine in 2017, and its recent habit has been to concede the mechanism while defending the reasoning. Sunday’s change follows that pattern almost exactly.

The next move belongs to the Commission, which will decide whether a regional exemption is a remedy or merely a gesture. Until it says so, Europe simply gets a slightly different Google.