The European Commission is finalising a fine against Google running into the high hundreds of millions of euros for violating the Digital Markets Act, according to reporting by Handelsblatt first published Monday, May 26. The penalty would be the largest issued under the DMA since the regulation took effect in March 2024, topping the 200 million euro fine handed to Apple in April 2025 for App Store steering violations.
The case centres on Article 6 of the DMA, which prohibits designated gatekeepers from favouring their own services in ranking. The Commission opened the formal non-compliance probe in March 2024, then reached preliminary findings that Google’s treatment of Shopping, Travel, and local search results constituted self-preferencing. A decision was not expected until now. The Next Web, citing the Handelsblatt report, says the ruling is expected before the Commission’s August recess.
The fine sits at the low end of the legal range. Under the DMA, the Commission can fine a gatekeeper up to 10 percent of global annual turnover for a first offence and up to 20 percent for repeat breaches. On Alphabet’s most recently reported revenues, the 10 percent cap would clear 35 billion dollars. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier has previously said the Commission is more focused on securing compliance than extracting maximum penalties.
Google has resisted the substance of the case throughout. The company has described the changes Brussels is demanding to its search product as the biggest downgrade in the product’s history, arguing that the proposed remedies would degrade the experience for European users without benefiting either rivals or consumers. Google has signalled it will challenge any adverse ruling in the EU’s General Court.
For SEO practitioners operating in European markets, the compliance remedies attached to any ruling matter far more than the fine itself. If the Commission requires Google to stop preferencing its own vertical surfaces, the direct beneficiaries would be third-party comparison sites and travel aggregators currently displaced by Shopping units, the Travel carousel, and the Local Pack. Organic positions that have been functionally pushed down the page by Google’s own properties could recover meaningful click share, though the redistribution would favour established comparison platforms before it flows to individual publishers or smaller regional operators.
Two parallel DMA proceedings add further pressure on the same set of results. A separate case opened in November 2025 addresses the alleged demotion of news publishers in search, a proceeding that European news SEO teams should treat as distinct but connected to the self-preferencing enforcement. A third process, expected to produce a binding decision by July 2026, would require Google to give rival AI assistants the same access to Android that Gemini currently receives; the downstream effect on AI-driven search discovery in the EU is not yet quantifiable, but the structural intent is to reduce Google’s ability to funnel users toward its own generative answers.
The self-preferencing case is also a data point on DMA enforcement velocity. The regulation was designed to move faster than the EU’s older antitrust track, under which a 2.4 billion euro Google Shopping penalty took eight years to be upheld by the bloc’s top court in 2024. The DMA case has taken over two years from opening to the fining stage, which is faster but still slow enough that Google has had ample time to mount a litigation strategy and appeal chain.
Preliminary findings on how Google must share search ranking and click data with competing search engines are still under consultation, separate from this case. A formal decision in the self-preferencing matter, including the final penalty figure, is expected within weeks.
European SEO operators running Shopping feeds or Travel-oriented content should monitor the Commission’s final decision closely: the compliance orders attached to it, not the fine amount, will determine whether and how fast organic visibility shifts in vertical SERP features across EU markets.
Reported by The Next Web on May 26, 2026, citing an underlying report from Handelsblatt.
