The EU Now Treats ChatGPT as a Very Large Search Engine

Somewhere in OpenAI's legal department, a compliance lead just inherited a four-month project plan. On August 31, the European Commission designated ChatGPT a "very large online search engine" (VLOSE) under the Digital Services Act, the first time an AI chatbot has been placed in that category. The clock the designation starts is not generous: full compliance with the extra obligations is due by the end of December 2026.

The trigger is arithmetic. The DSA applies its heaviest regime to search engines with more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU. The figure OpenAI reported to the Commission was 159.1 million average monthly EU users for the six months ending March 31, 2026, more than three times the threshold. The same batch of decisions designated Reddit (57.2 million EU users) and Roblox (48 million) as very large online platforms.

The to-do list that comes with the label

VLOSE status stacks additional duties on top of the standard DSA rules. ChatGPT must now:

• Run annual systemic-risk assessments covering illegal content, election integrity and effects on mental health,
• Maintain a public advertising archive, awkwardly timed given ChatGPT's brand-new ad business,
• Provide data access to vetted researchers,
• Publish transparency reports every six months,
• Operate illegal-content notice mechanisms and a crisis-response plan.

The penalty ceiling is the DSA's trademark deterrent: fines of up to 6 percent of global annual turnover. Commission executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen underlined that oversight of the service will now tighten.

A precedent bigger than one product

Until this decision, the VLOSE list had exactly two members: Google Search and Bing. The third member being a chatbot rather than a classic search engine is the real story. The Commission looked at ChatGPT's web search, source citations and shopping recommendations and concluded it functions as a search engine in practice, whatever the interface looks like. That reasoning will not stay confined to OpenAI. Gemini, Perplexity and any other assistant that crosses the user threshold can expect the same treatment, which means AI search as a category is now a regulated, audited, archived medium in the EU.

What compliance watchers should actually track

For businesses outside the EU, the practical effect arrives through the "Brussels effect": companies rarely build separate systems per market, so transparency reports, the ad archive and risk assessments built for Europe tend to surface globally. Two things are worth watching from anywhere. First, the ad archive will make ChatGPT's advertising business publicly inspectable, a level of visibility no AI assistant has offered before. Second, the systemic-risk reports will be the first regulator-mandated look at how a conversational AI shapes what millions of people read and buy. If your marketing or content strategy already accounts for Google's algorithm, add this new species of regulated search to the watchlist; the data to study it is about to become public.

Sources: The Decoder, Search Engine Journal