The European Commission has adopted final Digital Markets Act measures requiring Google to share anonymized Google Search data with eligible third-party search engines and AI chatbots from January 2027. The decision is a significant intervention in how a major search platform's data can be used by rivals, but it includes a crucial boundary: recipients cannot use the shared data to train general-purpose AI models.
The measures aim to make it easier for qualifying competitors to develop and optimize search services and AI-enabled search tools using data categories that Google uses to improve its own search offerings. At the same time, the Commission has set privacy, access, pricing and audit requirements intended to prevent the mandate from becoming unrestricted access to user-level search behavior.
What the DMA decision requires
The Commission adopted the final specification measures on 16 July 2026 under the DMA. According to the European Commission's Alphabet specification proceedings on Google Search data sharing, Alphabet must finalize its anonymized dataset and pricing by January 2027, then begin providing access to eligible beneficiaries in that month.
The dataset is intended to include the types of information Google uses to optimize search. That scope includes ranking data, query text, metadata such as language and device type, displayed URLs, interactions with search results, and information about result positioning. In practical terms, access could help an eligible service understand how queries, results and user interactions relate within European search use cases.
