Google Offers Spam Policy Changes to Avoid EU Antitrust Fine

Google has put forward changes to its spam policy as it tries to head off a European Union antitrust fine, a move that could decide whether Brussels sees a real fix or a tactical retreat. The dispute centers on Google’s site reputation abuse rules, which publishers say have pushed their news content lower in search results when they host material from commercial partners.

The European Commission opened formal proceedings on November 13, 2025, under the Digital Markets Act, focusing on whether Google applies fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory access and ranking conditions to publishers’ websites. The Commission said its monitoring found indications that Google was demoting news media and other publishers when those sites included content from commercial partners. Teresa Ribera has said the concern is that Google’s policies do not treat news publishers in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner.

Google has not described the proposal in detail, but the latest offer is aimed at its treatment of news results across search. That is the crux of the fight: publishers want to keep legitimate commercial arrangements, including sponsored or partner content, from being treated like spam. Google says its spam policies are meant to stop manipulative practices that exploit a host site’s ranking signals, and its Search Central guidance says violative pages can be ranked lower or removed from Google Search altogether.

The stakes are high. Reuters has reported that DMA breaches can carry fines of up to 10 percent of global annual turnover, while Bloomberg has put Google’s running total of European Union competition fines at about 9.5 billion euros. That makes the current offer more than a narrow policy tweak. It is an attempt to stop the case from hardening into another major penalty in Brussels.

The immediate winners would be publishers that rely on commercial partnerships to monetize traffic, especially news organizations whose pages mix editorial coverage with partner material. Google would keep some room to police spam, but it may have to narrow how aggressively it treats site reputation signals. The biggest losers would be operators of manipulative pages that trade on another site’s authority, the exact practice Google says it is trying to stop.

Google’s site reputation abuse policy was introduced in 2024 and updated in November 2024, after a March 2024 spam-policy update was published two months before enforcement began on May 5, 2024. Brussels will now weigh whether that policy is a legitimate anti-spam measure or an overly broad tool that suppresses lawful publisher revenue. The Commission declined to comment on the latest proposal, leaving Google’s offer to be judged by the parties it most affects.