Google seeks EU court freeze on search data sharing for AI rivals

What happened

On September 30, Google asked an EU court to pause a European Commission order that would make it share search data with rival search engines and AI chatbots, OpenAI among them.22 Google had sued the Commission over the order the previous Tuesday. It then also asked the General Court in Luxembourg, the EU's second-highest court, for an interim measure.23 News agency MLex was the first to report the request.24

Google's argument is mainly about privacy. A company spokesperson said interim measures exist for cases that risk serious harm, and that the data-sharing obligation under Article 6(11) of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is such a case because it threatens the privacy of European users.22 The Commission says its decision already accounts for integrity and security features and protects users' personal data.24

The request matters because of how EU law works. Filing an appeal does not pause a Commission decision. Under Article 278 of the Treaty, actions before EU courts have no suspensive effect unless a judge orders otherwise. Without that order, Google still has to start sharing data in January 2027.13 The interim application is Google's best chance of pushing that date back while the main case runs, which could take years.

What the order actually requires

The Commission adopted two binding specification decisions on July 16. One opens Android features to rival AI assistants. The other sets out how Google must share data from Google Search.11 The search decision says AI chatbots with search features are eligible to receive data. It also says Google must share the same data it collects to improve its own search, after anonymisation.11 Several outlets summarise the data as anonymised ranking, query, click and view data, provided on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.1726

The details show how far the Commission went. One analysis of the decision says the shared data would include query text, the results shown on the page and click and view behaviour. User identifiers, IP addresses, exact timestamps and follow-up queries within an AI Mode session would be removed, and location would be reduced to the regional level.13 The same analysis says the decision names ChatGPT, Mistral and Claude as chatbots that compete with Gemini and AI Overviews, and lists Qwant and Ecosia as challenger search engines.13 To qualify, a company would need at least 50,000 monthly EU users and either two years of EU operation or more than €50 million of investment.13

The Commission says it acted because voluntary compliance had failed. By one account, Alphabet's own proposal removed between 90% and 100% of unique search queries and left out AI chatbots entirely. After two years of talks, almost no one had taken up the offer.18 The Commission's decision lists chatbot eligibility as one of the gaps that had made Google's offer ineffective.11

Where the coverage diverges

Accounts differ on what AI companies would actually get. Some coverage suggests tools like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Claude could tap "the same data trove" behind Google's dominance.15 Closer readings are narrower. One SEO-focused analysis says the decision does not let a chatbot use the data to train a foundation model. Its use is limited to improving search technology such as retrieval and grounding.18 Another reports that permitted uses include grounding chatbot answers, refining retrieval and ranking, crawling and index building. It also says Google's ranking algorithms, account details and search histories are excluded, and that recipients face a 13-month retention cap and annual audits.16

The narrower reading appears to be correct, and it makes Google's privacy argument harder to sustain in its strongest form. The Commission says it built a layered anonymisation method with privacy experts, in line with draft joint guidelines from the Commission and the European Data Protection Board. It also lets Google assess, before sharing, whether a specific recipient poses serious cybersecurity or data protection risks.11 Google's competition chief has said the order would force it to hand over private search histories without enough anonymisation.13 Google's chief legal officer, Kent Walker, warned it could undermine privacy and security safeguards.15 One analysis notes that the shared data still counts as personal data under the GDPR, and that the Commission can reopen the case if independent review of the anonymisation changes the picture.18 There is a real privacy question here. But the court has to decide whether the risk is serious enough to justify a suspension, which is a high bar given the safeguards already in the decision.

Why this is a search-traffic story

For publishers and SEO professionals, this fight is closely tied to the steady loss of clicks from Google's AI features. Click and ranking data is the feedback loop that tells a retrieval system which of several plausible pages actually answered the user's question. One answer-engine optimisation (AEO) firm argues that giving an anonymised version of it to rival engines would directly improve the quality of chatbot answers for EU queries.16 On this view, the order is less about classic search competition and more about whether answer engines other than Google can compete on quality.

The traffic picture shows why that matters. A randomised field experiment with 1,065 desktop Chrome users found that outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% when an AI Overview appeared, while zero-click searches rose 34.5%. Clicks on ads did not change.2 The researchers found the effect was concentrated where the AI Overview sat at the very top of the page, which they reported was the case in more than 87% of appearances.2 An Ahrefs study from February 2026 found a 58% drop in click-through rate for top-ranking pages, almost double its earlier estimate of 34.5%.3 Pew Research found that users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one.1

Publisher data points the same way. Chartbeat's 2026 report found Google Search referrals to news and media sites fell 40.2% between July 2025 and July 2026. Google Search's share of pageviews across its network dropped from 9% in July 2024 to 5% in July 2026.8 The losses fall unevenly. Chartbeat found small publishers lost about 60% of search referrals over two years, compared with about 22% for large ones.10 UK publisher Reach reported Google referrals down about 55% and digital revenue down about 11.4% in its first-half 2026 results.10

The figures are not perfectly consistent. Some 2026 data suggests the trend may be levelling off: one dataset showed the zero-click rate falling slightly between December 2025 and March 2026.5 One industry analysis also warns that multi-year traffic declines cannot be blamed on AI alone.10 Still, every source points the same way, and the randomised experiment is the closest thing yet to causal evidence.2

The chatbot traffic gap

The hard truth for publishers is that rival AI tools have not yet made up for lost Google clicks. Chartbeat found AI referrals made up just 0.01% of publisher traffic, and that share slipped during 2026.8 So the DMA order would not, by itself, send traffic back to the open web. It could make alternative answer engines better and more widely used. Whether they then link to sources more generously than AI Overviews is a separate question that the decision does not address.

That makes the order's effect on SEO indirect. One analysis says the decision does not change Google's ranking systems, does not create a new optimisation surface, and does not give data to marketers. It advises teams to start tracking performance across multiple engines before the traffic mix shifts.18 For AEO, the practical point is that more capable rival engines in Europe would multiply the places a brand or publisher needs to be cited. Some analysis suggests being cited brings measurable benefits, though those figures come from vendors and should be treated with care.7

The wider pressure on Google

The court request comes as Google faces pressure on several fronts over AI search. Penske Media is pursuing antitrust claims, and the European Publishers Council has filed a complaint with the Commission.3 In May, Google announced changes to AI Overviews and AI Mode, including a "Further Exploration" links section and subscription labels, meant to send more traffic to publishers.3 Google has also said it is exploring ways for publishers to opt out of AI Overviews without losing their place in regular search, following pressure from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.4

Google's own defence of AI Overviews has rested on claims of more search usage and "higher quality" clicks. Publishers say they cannot check those claims without Google's engagement data.1 The DMA order would put some of that data, in anonymised form, in competitors' hands for the first time.

What to watch

The timeline is tight. Google's anonymised dataset is due to be finalised around mid-November 2026, with pricing settled and sharing starting in January 2027. The Commission will review whether the measures work by July 2028.13 The Android decision is a separate matter, with changes for users expected from July 2027.12

The interim ruling is the decision to watch. Suspensions of this kind are rare, and Google has to show that harm would be serious and hard to undo before the main case is decided. The privacy safeguards written into the decision, along with Google's power to screen individual recipients, make that harder to argue.11 If the General Court refuses, January 2027 becomes the first real test of whether opening Google's search data can make a competing answer engine credible in Europe. Publishers losing clicks to AI summaries will have a stake in that outcome, though it would be a stretch to expect the order to bring their traffic back.