The proposal comes 100 days after the Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin, where European leaders pledged to reduce critical digital dependencies and build sovereign infrastructure where necessary and feasible.
Search engines play a central role in both democratic societies and digital economies. They determine how citizens access information, how businesses are found online, and how artificial intelligence systems extract knowledge from search results.
Currently, 99.5% of search queries in Europe rely on answers provided by just two US companies (96%) and one Russian company (3.5%).
According to European Search Perspective, this concentration exposes European countries to systemic risks. If access to the dominant search indexing infrastructure were restricted—whether through sanctions regimes, regulatory conflicts, export controls, or trade decisions—governments could lose critical analytical capabilities, and economies could face complete collapse within days.
The majority of Europe's GDP (approximately €18 trillion) is directly dependent on the search index economy.
Therefore, European Search Perspective proposes that EU Member States establish a sovereign search infrastructure comprised of:
a national search index hosted under European jurisdiction,
a national ranking algorithm, and
infrastructure that supports both public search services and AI-based search systems.
“Without a sovereign search index, Europe does not control the gateway to its own digital economy,” says Wolfgang Oels, director of European Search Perspective. The organization argues that search infrastructure should be treated as strategic public infrastructure, comparable in importance to electricity or telecommunications networks. European Search Perspective is currently developing a sovereign search index for France and Germany and has offered to extend the initiative to other EU member states.
