The state space is where the work lands. One affected section used to carry one enforcement status. It now carries two, one per audience region, which gives four possible combinations of demoted and not-demoted for a single set of URLs [1]. Your reporting still returns one number covering all four.
On the EEA side, the mechanism is separation rather than removal. Google may split the affected part of the site in its systems for EEA results, and that separated section can then rank independently over time, with no promise it ranks well [4]. The action itself stays in place, scoped to the location of the searcher rather than the location of the business or the site [5]. A Dublin publisher with a mostly American readership keeps the demotion on the majority of its traffic. An American marketplace with a demoted section gets relief only on the queries served to people inside the EEA. Registered address does not enter into it.
A second confound arrives on August 30 itself. Where site sections had already been penalised in EEA results, Google says those actions can be lifted going forward for pages shown to EEA users [7]. So the EEA line on your chart can turn upward with no content change behind it. If you were treating remediation as an experiment with a before and an after, the August 30 boundary now sits inside your measurement window.
The dev.to write-up describing the change advises comparing EEA and non-EEA performance "where reporting tools allow location-level analysis" [10]. The hedge matters more than the advice: you get country-level rows, and the EEA is a membership list you assemble and maintain yourself. That list is defined by politics rather than by any reporting tool, so every recovery metric has to be re-aggregated against it before it says anything about enforcement. Rank checks from a single vantage point say less than they did, since they now describe one region's treatment of the section and nothing more.
For an "EEA looks fine, so we are fine" read to be evidence of recovery, both regions would have to be under the same index treatment. They are not, by design. Google has not described this as a general relaxation of the Site Reputation Policy, only as a targeted change to what a manual action does in EEA results [9], and its spam policies documentation already states that outside-EEA actions do not affect EEA rankings [6]. Google attributes the arrangement to discussions with the European Commission and to Digital Markets Act concerns [3]. Note also that this account comes from one secondary write-up summarising Google's policy update, and that write-up closes by selling an AI visibility assessment [12], which is at least candid about who profits from regional confusion.
Aggregate history across the boundary is the first thing that stops being trustworthy. A global traffic total can hide divergent regional outcomes [11], and for publishers and marketplaces with sections that reach several countries [14] it now reliably will.
