Europe put hard dates on the day Google has to hand rivals its query data, and on the same day Google was testing a gate in front of its own results page.
Access, Granted And Withheld: Rivals Get The Query Data, Automation Gets A Gate
Two opposite moves on the same surface landed together. One is a regulator forcing Google’s data outward, the other is Google putting friction in front of the results page.
- Google Publishes Rules For Rivals Licensing Its EU Search Data The European Search Dataset Licensing Program now has published eligibility thresholds, an application process, and fixed dates, all of it required by the European Commission under Article 6(11) of the Digital Markets Act rather than offered voluntarily. Qualifying rivals, including AI assistants that count as search engines under the law, can license anonymized query, click, impression, and position data. That is the closest any competitor has come to seeing what Google actually sees, and the first time the shape of that dataset has been public.
- Google Tests Continue Button To Verify Humans Before Results An interstitial now asks some searchers to click Continue before the results page loads, holding the button greyed out for a few seconds first. Glenn Gabe spotted it, and a French-language sighting suggests the test is not English-only. Anything that verifies a human before serving blue links is also a barrier to the tools that fetch them, so rank-tracking vendors are the ones to ask about this week rather than after the numbers drift.
Decided For You: An Impression, A Keyword, And Now The Ad Copy
Three changes with one shape. In each, Google altered what something means or who wrote it, and the advertiser or publisher inherits the result rather than choosing it.
- AdSense Moves to Begin-to-Render Impression Counting in 2027 From February 17, 2027, an AdSense display impression counts only once the ad actually renders, not when it begins downloading. Publishers should expect reported impression counts to fall with no change in real traffic, which makes any year-over-year comparison spanning that date misleading unless it is annotated now, well before someone reads the drop as a demand problem.
- Google Ads Flags Keyword Priority Loss In AI Max Moves Updated help documentation warns that broad keywords stop inheriting exact match prioritization once broad match is switched off at campaign level or the campaign moves onto AI Max. The behaviour is not new, but it was undocumented, which means some advertisers already made the move without knowing what they gave up.
- Google Ads Now Tags Store Review Summaries As AI Generated A “What customers love” module inside Google Ads now carries a disclosure saying its text was AI generated from store rating reviews. The label is the notable part: Google is choosing to mark machine-written ad copy as such, on a surface where the advertiser did not write the words appearing under their own brand.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Google Won’t Penalize Sites For Old Links That Later Turned Spammy John Mueller says a link you published years ago to a domain that has since changed hands and gone bad carries no ranking penalty, which makes mass retroactive nofollowing wasted effort.
- Google Discover Feed Fails To Load For Many Users, Then Recovers Discover stopped serving articles for a stretch on Tuesday before recovering, long enough to dent a day of referral traffic for publishers who lean on the feed.