Google's Senior Vice President of Knowledge & Information, Nick Fox, said the Digital Markets Act compliance changes forced "the biggest reduction in search quality in its 28-year history" and that shipping them makes him feel "terrible" and "sad." Fox made the comments in an interview with Pietro Valetto, snippets of which he shared on LinkedIn alongside a longer video discussion.

What Google removed in Europe

According to Fox's own LinkedIn post, Google has made "hundreds of changes to Search in Europe" under DMA enforcement over five years. Each change is small in isolation, he argued, but together they leave European users "with a Search that's significantly worse than anywhere else." The concrete removals he named include:

• Real-time pricing on products, including flight prices
• Direct clicks to Google Maps for directions
• Hotel filtering by travel dates

"We've launched to search which, you know, it makes me feel terrible, right?" Fox said in the interview. "It literally makes me sad that we need to degrade our product in this way. And each little bit of it maybe feels small, you know, but it's things like you can't find real-time pricing for a flight."

These are confirmed product removals Google itself has acknowledged — not third-party tool speculation.

The privacy argument against query data sharing

Fox framed the latest DMA decision — which would require Google to hand user search queries to competitors — as "a really massive violation of European privacy."

"The questions you bring to search are the most private questions you ask anyone," he said. "You bring to search questions that you don't ask your spouse, you don't ask your friends, you don't ask your doctor — these are very private questions about your health, your finances, any number of things."

He argued that once queries leave "the four walls of our data centers," where Google invests heavily in security, they become exposed to hacking and third-party misuse. He also noted the beneficiaries of data sharing are "typically not European companies," so the mandate "doesn't actually enable European competition in a meaningful way."

In his LinkedIn post, Fox wrote that the DMA decision would require Google to hand over "peoples' most private queries to other companies, without sufficient anonymization," and concluded: "Competition shouldn't come at the cost of privacy or a worse experience. Europeans deserve the best."

Google officially appealed the data-sharing mandate on the morning of the interview's publication. That appeal is a confirmed legal action; the privacy-risk claims are Google's own characterization of the DMA's requirements.

Spam protections pulled back in Europe

Fox also confirmed a direct SEO-policy impact: Google has been "forced to pull back on spam protections" in Europe, resulting in "lower quality results in Europe as a result." He specifically referenced site reputation abuse — meaning European search results face weaker enforcement against sites that "try to trick our algorithms" than results elsewhere.

For SEOs and publishers tracking European visibility, this is a confirmed statement from Google's Search leadership that spam enforcement differs by region under the DMA — a notable divergence from Google's usual framing of globally consistent ranking systems.

Fox still disputes zero-click studies

When Valetto said his own behavior has changed — "Often I see myself not even clicking on links anymore because the summary provides all the information I need" — Fox pushed back on zero-click narratives.

"In terms of clicking through to the web, people still click through to the web a lot," Fox said. "There have been articles written about the death of the web or zero-click. That's not what we're seeing. It depends on the question — if I'm asking a very simple question that can be answered very simply by an AI response, maybe that wouldn't lead to a click on that query, but most of the things people are doing are much longer, much deeper questions."

This is Fox's position, not independently verified click-rate data — Google has not published the underlying figures, and independent click studies reaching opposite conclusions remain unaddressed beyond his disagreement. He made essentially the same argument a year ago when he questioned click studies around AI Overviews, and he is standing by it.

What to monitor

Watch the outcome of Google's formal appeal of the query data-sharing mandate, any further European removals of SERP features tied to DMA enforcement, and whether the weakened site reputation abuse enforcement in Europe produces measurable ranking differences between EU and non-EU results.