Google Offers EU Concessions on News-Search Ranking to Head Off a Fresh DMA Fine
May 6, 2026 - 5:57 pm
The proposals filed in Brussels aim to settle the European Commission’s investigation into whether Google has been demoting publishers’ pages with third-party advertising content. Failure to settle could expose Alphabet to penalties up to 10 per cent of global revenue.
Google has filed a remedies offer with the European Commission proposing changes to how it ranks news content in search, in an attempt to settle a competition investigation before it produces a Digital Markets Act (DMA) fine. Bloomberg reported the filing on Wednesday, with the company seeking to avoid adding to a running total of €9.5bn ($11.2bn) in EU competition penalties accumulated since 2017.
The investigation, opened by the Commission in November 2025, focuses on Google’s “site reputation abuse policy”, introduced in March 2024. Under that policy, Google demotes pages on otherwise reputable websites when those pages host third-party content the company judges to be of low quality or unrelated to the host site’s main purpose.
The Commission’s concern is that the policy has been used to push down news publishers’ pages that include affiliate-marketing or third-party-advertising content, drying up traffic and revenue.
The European Publishers Council filed the original antitrust complaint that triggered the investigation. The council argued that the policy disproportionately affects news publishers, who routinely monetise editorial pages through advertising and affiliate partnerships.
Yet, the question is whether Google’s ranking algorithm gives news publishers fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory access to its search platform, the standard required of designated gatekeepers under DMA Article 6(11).
The remedies Google has offered have not been published in full. The proposals indicates that the company is willing to adjust how the site reputation abuse policy is applied to news domains, and to make the policy’s effect on publisher pages more transparent. The Commission has not yet indicated whether the proposals are sufficient to settle the case.
If the Commission rejects the offer and proceeds to a formal infringement decision, Google could face a fine of up to 10 per cent of Alphabet’s worldwide annual turnover. Cumulative EU antitrust fines against Google have already reached €9.71bn since the 2017 Google Shopping decision, and the company’s standing total is the largest of any individual technology operator under any single competition regime.
The news-search probe is one of several open EU files Google is currently navigating. Earlier today, we wrote on Google distinguished scientist Sergei Vassilvitskii’s warning to the Commission that its proposed remedies on DMA search-data sharing could expose European users to re-identification within two hours. Brussels’ parallel Cybersecurity Act revision has tightened the regulatory environment for non-EU technology suppliers more broadly. Google’s filing on the news-search case is the most direct attempt the company has yet made to address these challenges.