EU fines Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act

The European Commission fined Google €890 million on 23 July 2026 for breaching the Digital Markets Act, its first penalty against the company under the regulation. The decision splits into €460 million for favouring Google’s own services in search results and €430 million for restricting how developers steer users off Google Play, and it turns a rule European brands have watched for a year into a concrete order to change the results page.

What happened

The Commission took two non-compliance decisions on the same day. In Google Search, it found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over comparable services from third parties, displaying them more prominently at the top of the page or with enhanced visuals and filters. On Google Play, it found that Google prevented app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers to users through the channels of their choice, and that the steering fees Google charged went beyond what the DMA allows.

The Commission ordered Google to bring both practices to an end. Under the DMA, continued non-compliance can trigger periodic penalty payments, and reporting put the compliance window at 60 days.

Why it matters

Self-preferencing decides where results appear, and that is the ground every multi-location brand competes on. If Google has to rank its own shopping, hotel and transport modules on the same terms as everyone else, the layout of the results page shifts for whole categories at once across the EU. A first fine also signals that Google will keep reworking how it surfaces results in Europe to satisfy Brussels, so central teams should plan for more ranking volatility across the estate, not less.

“Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search.”

European Commission

What this means for multi-location brands

For a team running hundreds or thousands of locations, the answer is not to chase each ranking swing but to control the inputs that survive any layout change. Accurate, consistent data is what keeps a brand eligible across Google’s surfaces however the page is reshuffled, so keep every address, opening hour and category governed from one local business listing source of truth rather than profile by profile. The same discipline protects visibility in Google Business Profile and in the AI Overviews and AI Mode answers that increasingly read from that data, which is why the estate’s presence should be managed for AI search results as deliberately as its map pins. Push those updates through structured channels with the API suite and treat Europe’s largest platforms as regulated infrastructure when you plan presence for European multi-location brands, so a regulatory shift is a configuration change rather than a scramble across markets.

This decision follows the outcome our earlier report on the expected DMA search fine anticipated, and it lands alongside a separate Commission process on how Google must share search data with rivals.

The bottom line

Enterprise brands cannot influence how Brussels rules, but they can decide how ready they are for the fallout. Keep location data accurate and centrally governed, and the brand holds its place whichever way Google reshapes the results page to comply.