BRUSSELS, April 17, 2026 – The European Commission has issued a landmark preliminary ruling forcing Google to share its proprietary search data—including rankings, user queries, clicks, and page views—with rival search engines and AI services. The unprecedented mandate, delivered under the Digital Markets Act, demands fair and uniform access terms, aiming to dismantle Google's market dominance and fuel competition in both search and artificial intelligence development.

Google fights back over privacy concerns

The decision to include AI chatbots is a clear sign that Brussels sees these tools as direct competitors to traditional search.

Google has spent decades building up a store of user behavior data that no rival has been able to match. That stockpile now sits at the center of a major legal fight.

Google was formally charged in March 2025 with breaking the Digital Markets Act. The company has since pushed back hard against the latest proposals.

Clare Kelly, Google’s senior competition counsel, said the company would challenge the measures, calling them a stretch far beyond what the law was ever meant to require.

“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,” Kelly said.

The company also accused some of the pressure behind the investigation of coming from rivals looking to take its data, and warned that the privacy protections being proposed would not hold up.

Fines and a final deadline loom

The findings released Thursday sit roughly halfway through a formal process that the Commission started on January 27, 2026.

This process is designed to spell out exactly how a company must meet its legal obligations, rather than jumping straight to a penalty ruling. Still, the stakes are serious.

If Google fails to meet whatever final requirements are set, it could face fines worth up to ten percent of Alphabet’s total global revenue for a year, a figure that could top 35 billion dollars.

Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said in the official report that the push is happening at a “crucial moment of growing interconnection with AI services.”

A public consultation period opens Friday, April 17, 2026, and anyone who wants to weigh in has until May 1 to do so. The Commission plans to issue a final, binding ruling by July 27, 2026.

The case is seen as a test of whether Europe can actually force a global technology company to open its most closely guarded assets.

If it succeeds, the outcome could serve as a model for how governments elsewhere choose to handle the enormous data advantages held by large AI and internet companies.

The July deadline will show whether the rules favor those sitting on vast stores of data or those with new ideas but no data of their own.

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