A federal judge on Tuesday evening ordered major changes to Google’s search engine as part of a campaign to curb what was deemed a destructive illegal monopoly, but he simultaneously rejected the US government’s request to break up the company.

The 226-page ruling, issued by Federal Judge Amit Mehta in Washington D.C., is likely to have wide-ranging implications for the tech landscape at a time when the sector is being reshaped by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including conversational “answer engines” like ChatGPT and Perplexity that seek to challenge Google’s entrenched position as the main gateway to the internet.

Mehta attempts to restrict Google by imposing new limits on some of the methods the company has used to drive traffic to its search engine and other services, but he stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals Google has long made to secure its engine as the default option on smartphones, computers, and other devices.

Those deals, worth more than $26 billion annually, were at the heart of the antitrust case filed by the US Department of Justice about five years ago.

The judge also rejected the Department of Justice’s request to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, considering that request excessive.

Nevertheless, Mehta ordered Google to grant its current and potential competitors access to some of the “secret recipe” of its search engine — the data accumulated from trillions of queries — which has helped continuously improve the quality of search results.