The EU officially classifies ChatGPT as a 'Very Large Online Search Engine'

The European Commission has classified ChatGPT as a 'Very Large Online Search Engine' (VLOSE) under the EU's Digital Services Act — the same regulatory category that already covers Google Search and Bing. The designation follows an OpenAI disclosure showing ChatGPT's search feature reached roughly 159.1 million average monthly active users in the EU over the six months ending March 31, 2026, well above the 45 million threshold the EU uses to identify its largest platforms.

The Commission's reasoning centers on ChatGPT's hybrid nature: it can generate answers directly from its models, but it can also search the live web when answering a prompt, and that web-search capability is what triggers the search-engine classification. OpenAI now has until January 2027 to comply with VLOSE-specific obligations — including a formal risk assessment, a more extensive complaints and appeals process, and other Digital Services Act requirements. Non-compliance can carry penalties of up to 6% of a company's global annual turnover.

This is a meaningful regulatory milestone, not a product change you'll notice tomorrow — but it does put ChatGPT under a level of ongoing EU scrutiny that Google and Bing have operated under for years, and it's a sign of how thoroughly AI chatbots with web-search features are now being treated as search infrastructure by regulators, not just as a new category of app.