The European regulatory framework is reshaping the web faster than the technologies themselves. Between the Digital Services Act fully applicable since February 2024 and the AI Act, whose first transparency obligations are effective since August 2026, technical and marketing teams in companies are facing concrete operational constraints that change the way content is produced, distributed, and monetized online.
AI Act and obligations for marking AI-generated content
The European regulation on AI (AI Act, EU Regulation 2024/1689) came into effect on August 1, 2024, with a phased rollout until 2027. Since August 2, 2026, transparency rules require visible reporting of content generated or modified by artificial intelligence.
Specifically, standardized icons (AI, AI generated, AI modified) must accompany any content produced by an AI system. For editorial teams and marketing services, this changes the production chain: every visual, text, or video processed by a generative tool must be tracked and labeled before publication.
We observe that many companies underestimate the impact on their workflows. A CMS that does not manage native marking of AI content requires manual checks, which slows down publication. Brands that heavily use automatic generation of product sheets or SEO descriptions are the most affected. Several specialized monitoring services, including blog-actif.net, are tracking these regulatory developments as they are implemented.
DSA in 2024: strengthened regime for very large platforms
The Digital Services Act is fully applicable to all digital intermediaries since February 17, 2024. The strictest regime concerns very large platforms and search engines, which are subject to obligations for assessing systemic risks, independent audits, and algorithmic transparency.
In August 2026, the European Commission placed ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox under this strengthened regime, with a four-month deadline for compliance. The total number of services subject to this level of requirement has now reached 28.
For companies that rely on these platforms for their acquisition (social media, SEO, marketplace), the consequences are direct:
- Recommendation algorithms must be documented, which can change the organic reach of brand content overnight
- Advertising data is subject to increased transparency obligations, limiting certain behavioral targeting practices
- Cloud and hosting services fall within the scope of intermediaries, creating new responsibilities for SaaS providers
Media relations and social media teams must integrate these constraints into their distribution strategy. Sponsored content on a platform subject to the DSA requires mentions and tracking that social networks did not previously require.
Personal data and cloud: the convergence of GDPR-DSA-AI Act
We recommend no longer treating these three texts in silos. The GDPR governs the collection and processing of personal data. The DSA regulates moderation and transparency of platforms. The AI Act adds obligations on automated systems that process these same data. These three regulations overlap in the same technical scope: the data pipeline of a company.
A concrete example: a recommendation service produced by a machine learning model, hosted on a European cloud, which processes user data to personalize marketing content. This system simultaneously falls under the GDPR (personal data), the DSA (algorithmic transparency if the platform reaches the threshold), and the AI Act (obligation to document the system).
Companies that have not yet mapped this convergence accumulate a risk of non-compliance on multiple fronts. Legal departments and data teams must work together, which remains rare in organizations where these functions operate in parallel.
Web production trends: what is changing for technical teams
Beyond the legal framework, several technical developments are changing the daily lives of developers and site managers in 2024.
Web performance remains the most underestimated SEO lever. Core Web Vitals continue to weigh in rankings, and sites that adopt a technical sobriety approach (fewer third-party scripts, aggressive compression, server-side rendering) gain visibility against heavier competitors.
Digital accessibility is gaining momentum. The European Accessibility Act imposes concrete requirements on digital services, and companies treating accessibility as a secondary project expose themselves to legal actions. Front-end teams are now integrating WCAG audits into their development sprints, not at the end of the project.
On the media and content side, short video dominates social media strategies, but the return of long formats on certain platforms suggests that engagement depends more on relevance than on format. Brands that produce useful and specific content outperform those that merely follow trending formats.
Data and marketing strategy: balancing personalization and compliance
The planned end of third-party cookies is pushing companies towards first-party data strategies. Marketing services are investing in direct collection infrastructures (newsletters, customer accounts, loyalty programs) to reduce their reliance on third-party data.
This transition has a technical and organizational cost. Companies must:
- Implement consent management platforms compliant with both GDPR and DSA simultaneously
- Train marketing teams to leverage less granular but more reliable data
- Reconsider performance indicators: the consent rate becomes a KPI as strategic as the conversion rate
Social media remains a major acquisition channel, but its use requires ongoing regulatory monitoring. Each update of the DSA or the AI Act can change the advertising rules within a few months.
The web in 2024 is characterized less by a spectacular technological break than by a denseness of the European regulatory framework. Companies that anticipate these constraints transform a compliance obligation into a competitive advantage. Those that wait for deadlines expose themselves to costly and rushed adjustments.