Google has submitted an offer of commitments to the European Commission to avoid a potentially colossal fine. At the heart of the matter: the abuse of site reputation, a declassification rule which penalizes press pages monetized by third-party advertisements. An unprecedented concession for the American giant.

What to remember:

  • Google has proposed adjustments to its SEO anti-parasite policy specifically for EU news publishers, to avoid a fine of up to 10% of its global revenue.
  • The European Commission opened an investigation in November 2025 into this policy, deemed discriminatory against publishers who monetize their pages via affiliation or third-party advertising.
  • The exact content of the proposed commitments has not been made public. The Commission has not yet indicated whether the supply is sufficient.
  • This case is part of a broader context of cumulative pressure on publishers, already weakened by the drop in traffic linked to responses generated by AI in Google results.

What exactly is the “site reputation abuse policy”?

Introduced in March 2024, the “site reputation abuse” policy aims to combat the SEO parasite: a practice which consists of publishing content of low quality or unrelated to the main subject of a site, taking advantage of the authority of the latter to artificially position yourself in search results.

Concretely, Google declassifies the pages of a reputable site when they host third-party content deemed to be of poor quality or disconnected from the editorial vocation of the site. The stated intention is to protect users against misleading practices that degrade the quality of search results.

The problem is that this policy also affects completely legitimate uses. Press sites, for example, commonly monetize their editorial pages through affiliate partnerships or third-party advertising. This model is an economic reality of the sector, not an attempt at algorithmic manipulation.

Why the European Commission got involved

This is theEuropean Publishers Council (EPC), the European Publishers Council, which filed the antitrust complaint leading to the investigation. The organization argued that the policy disproportionately impacts news publishers, drying up their traffic and revenue.

The Commission opened its investigation in November 2025. The legal angle retained is that of Digital Markets Act (DMA): as a designated gatekeeper, Google is required to provide news publishers with fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory access to its search platform, in accordance with the regulations. The question asked is therefore simple: does the Google algorithm respect this obligation?

Google's proposal

Faced with the risk of a fine of up to 10% of its global turnover, Google has submitted a proposal for commitments to the Commission. Full details have not been released, but information reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and TheNextWeb, cited by Search Engine Roundtablee, allow us to identify the main points.

Google says it is ready to adjust the application of its reputation abuse policy to topical domains, and to make the effect of this policy on publishers' pages more transparent. In other words, press sites could benefit from differentiated treatment compared to the rest of the web.

On the Google side, communication remains cautious. A spokesperson told Reuters: “ Our priority is to keep search results useful to users and protect them from deceptive practices like SEO spam that harms the web. » The same message was relayed to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable.

A concession that calls out

This approach is unusual on the part of Google. The idea that a policy to combat spam can be modulated according to geography or type of site raises legitimate questions about the consistency of the approach.

If Google agrees to relax its rules for European publishers under regulatory pressure, why not apply the same treatment elsewhere ? And if the policy was indeed too harsh with publishers, shouldn't it be reviewed globally?

The situation is all the more delicate as European fines accumulate: since the Google Shopping decision in 2017, the total antitrust penalties imposed on Google in the EU have reached 9.71 billion euros. The company is obviously trying to avoid increasing this bill.

The rest of the procedure

The European Commission will now assess Google's proposals in light of the concerns raised by the investigation. It should consult publishers and other interested parties before deciding whether to accept the offer, request changes to it, or reject it and proceed to a formal decision of infringement.

No precise timetable has been communicated. The investigation also has no set deadline. What Bloomberg and TNW note is that Google clearly assessed that the financial and reputational risk of an adverse Commission decision exceeded the cost of revising its policy.

A broader context for publishers

This case cannot be read in isolation from the overall context. Press publishers are simultaneously experiencing another pressure from Google: the rise of AI-generated responses directly in search results, which mechanically reduces traffic to their sites and therefore their advertising revenue.

The reputation abuse policy and AI responses are two separate subjects, but their cumulative effect constitutes one of the main grievances brought by publishers in Brussels. The concession proposed by Google on the first point does not address the second, and press organizations know it.