EU orders Alphabet to share Google Search data with rivals

The European Commission has ordered Alphabet Inc. to open up its search data: on 16 July 2026 it adopted a decision requiring the company to share anonymised ranking, query, click and view data from Google Search with competing search engines on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The measure, published in the Official Journal of the European Union C/2026/4443 of 14 August 2026, concludes the specification proceedings opened under Article 8(2) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (the Digital Markets Act, DMA) in Case DMA.100209 – SP – ALPHABET – Article 6(11).

Alphabet was designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA on 5 September 2023, with Google Search listed as a core platform service. Article 6(11) DMA obliges gatekeepers to give third-party online search engines access, on FRAND terms, to data on free and paid search generated by end users. The Commission opened specification proceedings on 27 January 2026, communicated its preliminary findings on 16 April 2026 and obtained a positive opinion from the Digital Markets Advisory Committee on 15 July 2026; the public consultation drew more than 140 contributions.

What Alphabet must share

Under the decision, Alphabet must share four data categories, on par with the data it collects to optimise its own service:

• Query data – the queries entered by end users on any access point, together with modifications and related metadata;
• View data – the URLs and visual elements displayed on results pages and viewed by users;
• Ranking data – the absolute and relative positions of results on the page as shown on the user’s device;
• Click data – user interaction with any element of the results page, including the type, timing, order and duration of actions.

The data must be delivered in daily batches with a latency of no more than seven days, and beneficiaries may keep it for up to five years.

Who can receive the data

Eligible beneficiaries must satisfy a set of conditions verified by Alphabet under Commission supervision:

• operate a search engine in the EEA, including AI chatbots offering search functionalities;
• not be subject, directly or indirectly, to EU restrictive measures or sanctions;
• not be controlled by a third country posing a serious and structural cyber-security or data-protection risk;
• demonstrate at least 50,000 monthly users and two years of operation in the EU, or at least EUR 50 million in investments.

On pricing, the decision specifies that FRAND remuneration corresponds to incremental cost-based pricing: eligible beneficiaries pay only the incremental costs incurred by Alphabet in sharing the data, plus a reasonable return on capital employed, with an additional margin possible in exceptional circumstances. Before full access, Alphabet must offer a small free testing sample, a synthetic data sample and a 5 % sample of the search data.

How privacy is protected

Anonymisation combines technical and contractual measures aligned with the joint Commission and European Data Protection Board guidelines on the interplay between the DMA and the GDPR. Technically, Alphabet must suppress direct identifiers and long or rare queries, generalise location and interaction metadata, limit sessions to sets of three queries at most, and coarsen durations into time intervals. Contractually, beneficiaries must process data in a segregated environment, are barred from re-identification attempts and onward sharing, and may retain the data for no more than 13 months, subject to independent audits.

For European users, the decision strikes at the data advantage that underpins Google’s dominance in online search: giving independent engines access to the same ranking and query information should make their results more competitive, broaden choice for consumers and lower the barriers that AI-driven search challengers face.

Source: Official Journal of the European Union, C/2026/4443, 14 August 2026, C series, p. 1-5 (official reference: CELEX C/2026/4443).