Reading time: 7 min
Key Takeaways
- European search is weaker by Google’s own admission. Nick Fox, Google’s SVP of Knowledge & Information, says hundreds of DMA-mandated changes have made European search measurably worse than anywhere else.
- Antispam enforcement took a hit too. He claims Google was forced to loosen its anti-spam protections in Europe, which likely means more site reputation abuse slipping through SERPs.
- Google still won’t publish zero-click data. Fox denies AI Overviews are killing clicks but shares no numbers, leaving publishers to rely on their own Search Console figures.
I’ve seen this play out before. A platform gets regulated, the platform cries foul, and the practitioners on the ground are the last to know what actually changed in the SERPs.
So when a Google executive sits down for an interview and says the company is degrading its own product in Europe, that’s not a throwaway line. That’s a signal. Here’s what I took from it, and what I think most SEO coverage missed.
Nick Fox Says Out Loud What Google Has Been Hinting At For Months
Nick Fox is Google’s SVP of Knowledge & Information. He runs search. And in an interview with Pietro Valetto, he said the quiet part loudly: hundreds of changes forced by the Digital Markets Act have made European search notably worse than anywhere else in the world.
He used the word sad. He said it makes him feel terrible. For a company that spent 28 years telling the world search quality only ever moves in one direction, that’s a remarkable admission.
Fox framed it carefully on LinkedIn. Google supports the DMA’s goals, he said. Open, competitive markets are good. What Google disputes is how the rules are being applied.
Individually, each change looks small. Collectively, he argues, they’ve left European users with a search experience that’s materially inferior to what users elsewhere get.
That’s the mechanism. Small cuts, compounded across a surface that billions of people touch daily.
The Features Removed From European Search Aren’t Neutral
Fox listed specific losses. Read them carefully because the pattern matters:
- Product prices: Users can no longer see current pricing directly in search.
- Routes: No single-click jump to Google Maps for directions.
- Hotels: The date-range filter for stays is gone.
- Flights: Real-time pricing on flight queries is no longer displayed.
Fox presents these as user losses. And for a user, they are. You’re doing more work to get the same answer.
But here’s the part nobody talks about. For travel aggregators, price comparison sites, and booking platforms, those removed features were exactly the surface area the DMA was designed to open up. The regulator’s view is that Google was self-preferencing its own verticals — flights, hotels, maps — against the sites users would otherwise click into.
Both things can be true. Google’s product got worse for users. The competitive field got flatter for third-party sites. Whether that trade is worth it is a policy question, not a search quality question.
The Antispam Admission Is the One Actually Worth Amplifying
Buried in Fox’s comments is a statement that should concern every SEO working in the European market.
He claims Google was forced to reduce its spam protections in Europe, and that the consequence is lower-quality results showing to European users.
He doesn’t name a specific rule. But the context points strongly at site reputation abuse — what practitioners still call parasite SEO. That’s the pattern where a high-authority domain rents out its subfolders or subdomains to third-party content specifically to cash in on its ranking power.
Google has been actively enforcing against this pattern since its March 2024 policy update. If Fox is implying that enforcement had to be softened in Europe, that’s a direct quality hit on European SERPs. And it would be self-inflicted by the regulator, not by Google.
Slow down. Think about what that means for anyone building an affiliate or publisher business in Europe right now.
Google Took the Fight to the EU Court on September 29, 2026
The interview dropped the same day Google filed formal appeals with the General Court of the European Union. Two decisions are being contested.
- Search query sharing: The DMA requires Google to hand over search query data to third-party competitors. Compliance deadline: January 2027.
- Android modifications: Separate DMA-mandated changes. Compliance deadline: July 2027.
Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director of competition, framed the appeal around privacy. His argument: sharing user search history without sufficient anonymization would cause a massive privacy violation for Europeans.
Fox expanded on this. His three points:
What people search for is deeply personal. Health symptoms. Financial problems. Family situations. Queries you wouldn’t necessarily share with your partner or your doctor.
Once that data leaves Google’s servers, it’s exposed. Hacking risk. Misuse risk. Data that was never meant to travel now leaves the perimeter.
The beneficiaries aren’t European companies. Fox points out that the recipients of this data are, in his characterization, generally not EU-based firms — so the competitive benefit to Europe is questionable at best.
On anonymization, Fox argues the current decision doesn’t require enough of it.
Remember: in June 2026, Google was already forced to let users transfer their search history to authorized third parties — reward platforms, promo code services, that sort of thing. Google also quietly opened a licensing program for access to those datasets.
The stakes are brutal for Google’s bottom line. Non-compliance under the DMA can trigger fines up to 10% of global annual revenue, doubled to 20% for repeat offenses. On top of that, daily penalties can hit 5% of average daily global revenue.
The Zero-Click Question: Fox Still Won’t Show His Data
Around minute twelve, Pietro Valetto asks Fox directly about zero-click searches. Valetto says he often doesn’t click anymore — the AI-generated summary is enough.
Fox pushes back. He says people still « click a lot » toward the web. He references the « death of the web » narrative and dismisses it.
But then he qualifies himself. For simple questions where an AI answer is sufficient, sure, there may be no click. And then: most queries are longer and more complex now, he claims, so clicks still happen.
I’ve heard this before. Exactly one year ago, Fox was saying the same thing about AI Overviews — that third-party studies showing click declines were wrong, and that his team saw something different.
Here’s the pattern. Third-party researchers publish click-through-rate studies. Ahrefs ran one in France a month after AI Overviews launched, showing a measurable organic click drop when an AIO was present. Google doesn’t counter with data. Google counters with assertions.
No number on the share of AI Overview queries that generate a click. No metric on the traffic sent to publishers. Nothing auditable. And Google has the data — Search Console belongs to them.
This isn’t a take. It’s a pattern. And it goes back years.
So What Should European SEOs Actually Do With This?
The playbook changed. Again. Here’s how I’d read the situation.
Stop relying on Google’s narrative about clicks. Pull your own data. Open Search Console. Segment by query intent. Check impressions trend versus clicks trend. Compare your country-level performance against any non-EU markets you have a footprint in. If European clicks are declining faster than non-European clicks on equivalent pages, you’re seeing the Fox effect in your own data.
Watch the parasite SEO angle closely. If antispam enforcement has genuinely slackened in Europe, we’ll see it in SERPs before Google says anything. Look for authoritative domains with mismatched subfolder content ranking on terms they shouldn’t touch. Document it. If you’re competing on those terms, that’s the enemy your commission is funding.
Don’t treat the DMA as neutral regulation. Whatever your politics, it’s actively reshaping the SERP surface your business sits on. Feature removals on travel, hotels, and prices flow downstream to every affiliate site in those verticals. If your rankings depend on features that may be regulated out of existence, diversify now, not when the next order drops.
Build for compounding, not for quick plays. I’ve watched every iteration of this movie since 1997. Every time a platform gets squeezed by regulators, affiliates get squeezed hardest in the intermediate phase. The people who win are the ones building properties that generate genuine demand, not properties that ride a SERP feature.
The Bottom Line
Google is telling European regulators, in public and through its executives, that the DMA has broken European search. That may be true. It may be litigation strategy. It might be both.
What’s not in dispute: European users are getting a different search product than the rest of the world, and publishers are still being asked to take Google’s word on click behavior without seeing a single row of verifiable data.
Here’s what actually happened. Google got regulated. It fought back. And the practitioners on the ground were told to figure it out. That’s been the deal since the first algorithm update — and it’s not changing any time soon.
Just remember to measure your own traffic. That’s the only search data nobody can spin.
Building websites since before Google existed. I’ve run SEO, growth, and content for startups across California — and I’ve watched every ‘revolutionary’ tactic eventually expire. What doesn’t expire: understanding systems, compounding effort, and thinking slower than everyone else.