Google ends EU search penalty for publishers to head off Digital Markets Act fine

Google said on Friday it will stop enforcing a search-ranking penalty against European news and commercial publishers, a concession aimed at heading off a possible fine under the European Union's Digital Markets Act. The change, detailed in a post on Google's Search Central blog, takes effect August 30 and applies only to searches made from the European Economic Area.

At issue is Google's "site reputation abuse" policy, adopted in 2024 to stop what the company calls parasite SEO: the practice of publishing paid or syndicated third-party content on a well-ranked website to borrow its authority in search results. Publishers, including news organizations that run sponsored sections or license wire content, said the policy swept up legitimate commercial arrangements along with the manipulation it was meant to catch, and complained to Brussels that enforcement was costing them traffic and revenue.

What is changing

Under the new approach, Google will keep issuing manual actions when it finds a site hosting third-party content it judges to be gaming search rankings. But for users searching from the 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, those manual actions will no longer suppress the site's ranking. Outside the EEA, the penalty continues to apply as before, meaning the same page can rank normally for a reader in Dublin while still being demoted for one in London or New York.

A Google spokesperson said the company remains "concerned about efforts to weaken our spam policies" but had "agreed to make changes to our enforcement approach for users in Europe," according to trade publication Search Engine Roundtable, which first detailed the mechanics of the regional carve-out. Google added that it still considers the underlying policy necessary "to ensure a better, more reliable search experience." The company had begun enforcing the policy in Europe in January 2025, roughly a year after introducing it globally as part of a broader core update aimed at low-quality and manipulated content.

• Google's manual-action penalty for "site reputation abuse" no longer applies to EEA searchers starting August 30
• The policy still applies in full outside the EEA, including in the United States
• The European Commission opened its investigation into the policy in November 2025
• Google was separately fined €890 million by the Commission in July 2026 in an unrelated DMA case

How the case got here

The European Commission opened a formal investigation into the policy in November 2025, its first specification proceeding examining whether Google Search complies with the DMA's requirement to give publishers "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" access to the platform. Commission officials said their monitoring had turned up evidence that the site reputation policy was demoting news outlets and other publishers specifically because they hosted content from commercial partners — a common way for smaller publishers to earn revenue by licensing space to advertisers, aggregators or other outlets.

The DMA, in force since 2023, designates Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft as "gatekeepers" subject to a stricter rulebook than ordinary antitrust law, with penalties that can reach 10% of a company's worldwide annual turnover for a first offense. Google is no stranger to that exposure: the Commission fined the company €890 million in July in a separate case over self-preferencing of its own shopping and travel results in Search and over restrictions on app developers steering users to cheaper payment options in the Play Store. Friday's policy change is a bid to avoid a similar outcome in the publisher-demotion case before the Commission reaches a final decision.

Who is affected

The immediate beneficiaries are European news publishers and other commercial websites that host licensed or sponsored third-party content — the group whose complaints triggered the Brussels inquiry in the first place, as wire reporting on the announcement noted. For them, the change restores a revenue channel that had become riskier to use once Google began enforcing the policy in the region last year. It does not change anything for publishers or advertisers outside the EEA, where the same content arrangements can still trigger a ranking penalty, nor does it touch Google's other DMA obligations around self-preferencing and app store rules that are the subject of separate, unresolved proceedings.

"Thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content," said European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier, adding that the Commission will monitor Google's compliance with the change.

Reaction and what comes next

Regnier's comment, reported by Reuters and picked up by outlets including RTE, framed the move as a win for the DMA's publisher-access provisions rather than as the close of the case. The Commission has not said whether it will formally end the November 2025 investigation now that Google has changed its enforcement approach, or whether it will still seek a finding of infringement covering the period before the change takes effect. Google, for its part, has signaled it disagrees with the underlying premise, maintaining the policy is needed to keep manipulated content out of search results, and has not said whether it will contest any further Commission action.

The episode adds to a run of DMA enforcement actions against Google that has intensified through 2026, following the €890 million fine in July and years of smaller disputes over ad tech, default settings and app distribution. It also illustrates a pattern regulators and companies are increasingly falling into under the law: rather than litigate specification proceedings to a final infringement decision, gatekeepers are opting to adjust products region by region once Brussels signals it has found a problem, trading a narrower, EEA-only fix for the chance to avoid a fine and a formal finding of wrongdoing. Publishers' groups and rival search engines are likely to watch closely for whether Google's enforcement data, once available, shows the change actually restoring lost visibility, or whether the site reputation flags simply move underground in ways that are harder to challenge.