Google has published new details about its European Search Dataset Licensing Program, which will give qualifying search providers access to anonymized ranking, query, click and view data from Google Search.
The program is required under the EU’s Digital Markets Act and applies to search engines operating in the European Economic Area. AI chatbots with search functionality can also qualify.
Applicants must have averaged at least 50,000 monthly EU users during the previous year. They must also have offered search services in the EU for two years, or be less than two years old with more than €50 million in investment.
Google will begin providing licensing agreements on September 17, with data samples available from November 16. The data goes further than the information Google gives publishers through Search Console.
Under the European Commission’s binding measures, competitors can receive the URLs shown in search results, their positions and details about how users interacted with them. That includes clicks, returns to the results page, hovering, scrolling, swiping and viewing duration.
Search Console gives website owners clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. It does not show those additional interaction signals, and Google omits some queries from its tables.
This creates a strange situation: a rival search engine may receive more information about how people interact with a publisher’s result than the publisher itself.
The dataset is not a complete copy of Google Search. Rare queries can be filtered, exact timestamps are removed and only the first query from an AI Mode conversation is included. The data will also be delayed by at least seven days and recipients must follow strict auditing and storage rules.
The EU created the program to help search engines compete with Google, not to improve publisher reporting. Publishers, meanwhile, will continue working with Search Console’s four headline metrics.
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