EU Orders Google to Share Search Data With AI Rivals

The Commission binds Google to two DMA obligations at once

The European Commission moved from investigation to enforcement on Thursday, issuing two binding specification decisions that tell Google exactly how it must comply with the Digital Markets Act. The decisions close proceedings the Commission opened in January, and they land days before the six month statutory deadline. They are legally binding, not preliminary findings.

The first obligation targets search. Google must share the anonymized ranking, query, click, and view data it uses to optimize its own results with rival search engines and, for the first time, with AI chatbot providers whose products answer questions from the live web. The Commission set the terms as fair, reasonable, and non discriminatory, the same standard that governs access to essential infrastructure. AI assistants that answer with current web results depend on retrieval, the same retrieval augmented generation approach that grounds modern chatbots, and the quality of that grounding is capped by the search data a provider can reach.

The second obligation targets Android. The Commission found that AI assistants not built by Google could not operate on Android phones at the level Gemini does. Google must now let third party assistants be set as voice activated defaults and run background tasks such as booking a restaurant through another app.

What the order changes for AI assistants, developers, and users

For competing labs, the search remedy is the consequential half. Access to Google's ranking and click data narrows the single largest advantage Google holds over rivals building search grounded assistants, and it hands developers a data source they could not previously license at any price. For Android developers, the interoperability rule removes the friction that kept alternative assistants a step behind Gemini. For users in Europe, the practical result is that a non Google assistant can become the phone's default voice, which is the position that decides which AI millions of people actually use.

Google signaled it will resist the framing even as it complies. Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google and Alphabet, warned that the remedies strip out privacy safeguards the company built.

The Commission's answer is that Google controls a store of behavioral data no competitor can assemble independently, and that leveling access is the purpose of the DMA. What makes Thursday's order hard to slow is timing. The July 8 ruling in the Apple case established that a designated gatekeeper cannot challenge a DMA obligation before the Commission issues a specific enforcement decision, so Google's compliance clock starts now and any appeal follows later.

Europe did not fine Google on Thursday. It did something more durable, which is to convert Google's most valuable private asset, the record of what its users search and click, into shared infrastructure that its competitors and their AI models can build on.