EU Designates ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine Under the Digital Services Act, Setting a January 2027 Compliance Deadline

Overview

The European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), and both Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), under the Digital Services Act (DSA), according to the European Commission. The designations were published on August 31, 2026, and were triggered because all three services declared that they reach at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU, the threshold the DSA sets for its strictest tier of oversight, according to the European Commission.

What We Know

• Following notification of the designations, the three services have a four-month compliance window, extending to January 2027, to meet the additional DSA obligations that apply to VLOPs and VLOSEs, according to the European Commission.
• Designated platforms must assess and mitigate systemic risks stemming from their services and algorithmic systems, specifically covering the dissemination of illegal content, negative effects on minors, users’ physical and mental well-being, fundamental rights, electoral processes, and public security, according to the European Commission.
• The fuller compliance package also requires annual independent audits, opening internal data to researchers, offering at least one recommendation system not based on profiling, publishing an advertisement repository, and releasing content moderation reports twice a year, as Tech Policy Press reported.
• ChatGPT reaches 159.1 million search users in the EU, a figure Tech Policy Press reported comes from ChatGPT’s own help documentation on DSA compliance.
• The Commission calls ChatGPT a “hybrid service” because, as Tech Policy Press explained, “the chat interface that lets users interact with the model does not necessarily search the web.” Both the Commission and OpenAI’s own DSA transparency reports had already treated ChatGPT as subject to the general obligations for online search engines since 2024, before this stricter designation, according to Tech Policy Press.
• The ad-repository requirement traces to Article 39 of the DSA, and researcher data-access obligations trace to Article 40(4) for vetted researchers and Article 40(12) for non-vetted access to publicly available data, as Tech Policy Press detailed.
• OpenAI began showing ads inside ChatGPT across 31 markets on August 24, one week before the designation, according to Tech Policy Press. Those ads are tailored to the topic of the conversation a user is having and appear only for people on the free and low-cost Go tiers, Tech Policy Press reported.

What We Don’t Know

• The European Commission’s announcement does not itself spell out the audit, researcher-access, ad-repository, and recommender-system specifics — those details come from outside analysis of the DSA’s existing VLOP/VLOSE framework rather than from the Commission’s designation notice itself.
• It is not yet clear how OpenAI, Reddit, or Roblox will structure their compliance filings before the January 2027 deadline, since the four-month window has only just begun.

Analysis

Applying the DSA’s existing playbook to ChatGPT is not entirely straightforward. The rule requiring at least one recommendation option that isn’t based on user profiling was written for services that rank content, but ChatGPT doesn’t produce a ranked list at all. As Tech Policy Press put it, “the result is a synthesized answer rather than a ranked list, where it is less obvious what information the system prioritized,” making it harder to define what a non-profiling version of ChatGPT’s output would even look like.

The timing of OpenAI’s ad expansion adds another wrinkle: because the company began showing conversation-tailored ads across 31 markets just a week before the VLOSE designation took effect, the new Article 39 ad-repository obligation will apply to a monetization feature that is barely a month old by the time compliance is due.