The European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act on 31 August, the first AI assistant placed in that tier. ChatGPT reported about 159 million average monthly users in the European Union for the six months to March 2026, more than three times the 45 million threshold that triggers the rules. Reddit and Roblox were named Very Large Online Platforms the same day, taking the number of services under the DSA’s strictest oversight to 28.
The designation starts a four month clock, with compliance due by the end of December. OpenAI will owe annual risk assessments, independent audits, twice yearly transparency reports, an advertising repository and data access for vetted researchers. Penalties for non-compliance reach 6 per cent of global annual turnover. Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s technology vice president, said the services now face a higher standard of scrutiny and accountability. OpenAI said its search feature already operates as a search service under the DSA and that it is preparing.
The label attaches to the narrow part of the product that retrieves and ranks live web results, since that is what meets the DSA’s definition of a search engine. The part that writes the answer sits outside the designation. A rulebook drafted for ranking links now covers a system whose main output is composed prose.
What the Commission has not published is how this works for an answer engine. Risk assessment, researcher access and the ad repository were specified for services that return lists, and ChatGPT mostly does not. Whether Gemini, Copilot and other assistants cross the same threshold is unstated, as is where the DSA ends and the AI Act begins. Brussels has a template for search, not for this.
