The European Commission this week requested, but did not order Google to allow third party search engines in Europe access to its search data as a means to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), legislation the Commission describes as a law designed to “make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable.”

Google was sent a set of proposed measures on Wednesday that, according to a release, would grant third party search engines, including Qwant from France, Mojeek, based in the UK, swisscows from Switzerland, and Ecosia, Good, and metaGer, all headquartered in Germany, the ability to access search data, such as ranking, query, and click and view data “on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.”

In a statement, Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition with the Commission, said that the decision “sets out the specifications we expect Google to follow to comply with its obligations under the [DMA]. Data is a key input for online search and for developing new services, including AI.”

The measures themselves cover several areas, including the scope of the search data Google must share, the means and frequency by which it must happen, and parameters for “setting fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory prices for search data.”

Move ‘far exceeds DMA’s original mandate’

In response to the Commission’s request, Clare Kelly, senior competition counsel for Google, said Thursday in a statement, “hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their most sensitive searches, including private questions about their health, family, and finances, and the Commission’s proposal would force us to hand this data over to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections.”

The company, she said, “will continue to vigorously defend against this overreach, which far exceeds the DMA’s original mandate and jeopardizes people’s privacy and security.”

Phil Höfer, board member of SUMA-EV, which develops and runs MetaGer, said, “the planned measure might help with optimizing and developing European competitors to Google’s search service, but is not what’s needed most at this time. As long as the Commission isn’t planning on forcing Google to share their index data as well, this will not do much.”

Even better, he said, would be for the Commission “to decide to continue funding the European Open Web Index and allow European actors to build a competing infrastructure. We are convinced that without a European index, the EU will not be able to compete with American search engine giants.”

Forrester Senior Analyst Dario Maisto said the decision from the Commission is “not too timely but definitely in line with the measures Europe needs to free up businesses and citizens from risky dependencies on foreign organizations, vendors, and technologies. The final outcome is truly uncertain, though: one thing is to provide access to data to other players, one other thing is to modify users’ behaviors. We have to remember that the synonym for doing a search on the internet is actually: Google it.” 

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said that opening Google’s search data to third parties could make search more specialized again, especially in high-value verticals where users want results tailored to a specific industry or service need.

Enterprise digital teams, he said, may need to optimize for multiple discovery environments rather than relying just on Google alone, and software buyers could see more choice as search and intelligence vendors build on shared data.

In addition, said Jackson, “it could revive domain-specific search models, but I think a more fragmented search ecosystem might raise manipulation risks, fraud, and poisoned results. That would make governance and monitoring much more important.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, noted that, in terms of the impact on enterprises if Google shares search data under DMA, “this is being framed as a competition move, but that is not where the real impact sits. What is actually shifting here is control over how enterprise information is interpreted by machines.”

Definition of optimization is changing

For a long time, he said, “enterprises have quietly relied on the stability of a dominant discovery layer led by Google. That stability shaped everything from how content was written to how digital performance was measured. What is changing now is not just who has access to data, but how many systems can interpret that data.”

Gogia pointed out, “as alternative engines improve and start to matter, enterprises will find themselves operating in an environment where the same content can be surfaced differently, depending on which engine or AI system is doing the interpreting. That creates inconsistency, and over time, inconsistency becomes risk.”

There is, he said, also a deeper shift underneath all this: “Search is no longer just about helping users find information. It is increasingly the layer that feeds AI systems, copilots, and automated decisions. Once that layer fragments, enterprises no longer have a single reference point for how they are represented externally. That loss of coherence is subtle at first, but it builds into something much more material.”

Addressing the question of whether or not enterprises will need to optimize for multiple algorithms, he said, “the short answer is yes, but the bigger point is that the definition of optimization itself is changing. Enterprises are moving away from a world where they could tune for one dominant system into one where relevance is decided differently across multiple engines that do not follow the same rules.”

Search engines such as Qwant, Ecosia, and Mojeek, “each approach indexing and ranking differently,” Gogia said. “Some rely on their own infrastructure, others blend multiple data sources. The result is that the same piece of content can behave very differently across environments, even when nothing about the content itself has changed.”

What complicates this further, he said, “is the rise of AI-generated answers. Enterprises are no longer competing for links, they are competing to be included in summaries that may not even reveal where the information came from. That shifts the focus away from keywords and toward clarity, context, and credibility. The organizations that do well will be the ones whose content holds up across systems, not just within one.”

Interested parties have until May 1 to submit views on the proposed measures prior to a final decision, which will be binding on Google and must be adopted by July 27.