Google Revises EU Spam Policy After Antitrust Fine

Google has implemented a significant change to its search spam policies for the European Economic Area, creating a separate enforcement framework that avoids manual penalties for websites hosting third-party commercial content. The update, announced on August 28, 2026, and set to take effect on August 30, follows an 890 million euro antitrust fine levied by the European Commission in July and years of regulatory scrutiny over how the search giant's rules affect publishers.

The policy shift directly addresses a formal investigation opened by the European Commission on November 13, 2025, under the Digital Markets Act. Regulators had questioned whether Google's enforcement of its site reputation abuse policy unfairly demoted news publishers and other entities that incorporate third-party content, such as affiliate marketing or commercial partnerships. The Commission's competition chief, Teresa Ribera, stated at the time that publishers were not being treated in a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory way.

Under the revised rules, pages within the EEA that might otherwise face manual actions for site reputation violations will no longer be penalized with demotion or removal in...