How to Search Safety Gate Alerts: Using the EU Rapid Alert System to Check Product Risks

What Safety Gate is: the system, the portal and two gateways

Under the GPSR (Regulation (EU) 2023/988) and the Commission's guidance, Safety Gate has several parts:

What gets notified: member states must notify corrective measures taken by their authorities or by economic operators against products presenting a serious risk (Article 26(1)), within four working days of the measure (Article 26(4)). Measures on lower-risk products may also be notified (Article 26(3)). The Commission checks each notification and passes it to the other member states (Article 26(5)), which must report their own follow-up measures on the same product (Article 26(7)). The criteria for assessing the level of risk are in Annex II to Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/3173.

Scale: the Commission's Safety Gate 2025 annual report records 4,671 validated alerts in 2025. By product category, cosmetics accounted for 36%, toys 16% and electrical appliances and equipment 11%; by risk, chemical risks accounted for 53%, injuries 14% and choking 9%.

For how to report accidents and dangerous products through the Safety Business Gateway and how to run a recall, see accidents, recalls and Safety Gate. This guide covers searching and using the alerts.

Where to find it

These entry points come from the Commission's guidelines (C/2025/6233) and the Safety Gate home page, checked on the date above. Page design and labels may change; the official pages prevail.

• Portal home: ec.europa.eu/safety-gate
• Alerts search: Safety Gate alerts search. The Commission's guidelines say any alert published since 2005 can be searched.
• Weekly reports: alerts grouped by week, good for regular browsing.
• Subscription: the Safety Gate subscription page sends the weekly list of new alerts. The search page also links to an XML API for teams that want automated monitoring.
• Contacts: the portal's Contacts page offers a downloadable list of national contact points.
• Other material: annual reports, reports from the Coordinated Activities on the Safety of Products (CASP), in which EU and EFTA authorities test product groups together, and product factsheets for businesses.

The portal is free and needs no account.

How to search: the filters

When this guide was checked, the alerts search page offered these filters:

Search tips:

• Alerts are displayed in English, so search in English and try synonyms.
• Combining category and risk type, for example childcare articles plus strangulation, misses less than a single keyword.
• Search for products that share a structure, material or power source with yours, not just identical ones. Risks often come from common parts such as button batteries, magnets, cords or charging modules.
• Write down your search settings and the date so you can repeat the same search later.

Reading an alert

When checked, an alert page showed the following fields (how much is published varies by alert):

• alert number, publication date and notifying country;
• product category, product type, name and brand, identifiers such as model, batch or barcode, and photos of the product and packaging;
• product and packaging description;
• country of origin;
• risk type and risk description: a sentence or two on how harm can occur, for example a part that is too long and can be put in the mouth by small children, causing choking;
• the EU legislation and European standards against which the product was tested and did not comply;
• measures taken by the economic operator or ordered by the authority, such as recall, stopping sales or a marketplace removing the listing, with dates;
• other countries where the product was found and measures taken, and in some alerts the online traders or marketplaces where it was offered.

The risk description and the failed standard are the most useful parts for sellers: the first shows how authorities look at this kind of product, the second tells you which standard and test to check. Many measures are listing removals or recalls of online sales, which shows that products sold online are tested too.

Read alerts in context. They reflect measures based on an authority's risk assessment (Article 33(1) requires public access to product identification, the nature of the risk and the measures taken), and authorities can reach different conclusions on the level of risk (Article 29(2)). An alert is not an overall verdict on a brand.

Using alerts in your risk analysis

1. Before launch: when sourcing or developing a product, search the last few years of alerts by category and risk type, and send a list of recurring problems to your factory so they are designed out at sample stage.
2. Record it in the technical file: Article 9(2) requires an internal risk analysis before placing a product on the market. Add a "Safety Gate check" entry with the search date, settings, relevant alert numbers and your response. See how to do a GPSR risk assessment and GPSR technical documentation.
3. Compare with your tests: where an alert names a failed standard clause, check whether your test report covers that clause and whether the tested sample matches what you sell. If not, consider extra testing; see GPSR test reports and standards.
4. Improve warnings and instructions: if a hazard keeps appearing, check that your warnings and manual address it; see how to write safety information and instructions.
5. Monitor regularly: subscribe to the weekly reports and rerun your saved searches on a fixed schedule, for example monthly, and log the results.
6. Take look-alikes seriously: if a notified product comes from your factory or is structurally identical to yours, act on it. Under Article 9(8), once you have reason to believe your product is dangerous, you must take corrective action immediately.

Marketplaces use the same data. They must take Safety Gate information into account in their voluntary measures to detect and remove offers of dangerous products (Article 22(6)), and the Commission's guidelines say they should use at least the Safety Gate portal information for the random checks required by Article 31(3) of the Digital Services Act. When many similar products are notified, expect document requests on your listings too.

Finally: no alerts only means no published alerts. It does not show that your product is safe or compliant.

The consumer reporting channel: Consumer Safety Gateway

Article 34(3) lets consumers and other interested parties tell the Commission about products that may be dangerous through a separate section of the portal. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1740, applicable since 13 December 2024, sets out how:

• What is reported (Article 1): product identification; supply-chain data, in particular the operator or marketplace where it was bought, its country of establishment and the product's EU responsible person; evidence of the risk, including accident circumstances and injuries; the reporter's member state, name and contact details; and any contact with the operator or marketplace.
• Automated filtering (Article 2): the portal checks whether the report concerns product safety; a simple malfunction without a safety concern is not passed on.
• Who receives it (Article 3): the authorities of the reporter's member state, the member state of purchase and the member state where the responsible person or marketplace is established; all other member states can also see it.
• Retention (Article 4): personal data is kept for at most 5 years.

For sellers, this means a consumer report can land with the authority in your EU rep's country. Keep a working complaints channel (Article 9(11)) and investigate and log safety complaints (Article 9(12)). A customer whose problem you solve is less likely to file a report that an authority then follows up.

If your product is notified

• Alerts usually follow a measure. Article 26 covers measures already taken by authorities or operators, and also envisaged measures where a serious risk is urgent (Article 26(2)). Before an authority decides, you will normally have received a request and had a chance to be heard (Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 Article 18); see EU market surveillance requests and inspections.
• Other countries follow up. Other member states report whether they find the product and what they do (Article 26(7)), and a product found dangerous in one member state is presumed dangerous in the others (Article 29(1)). Marketplaces act on it too.
• What to do: take corrective action immediately, notify every member state of sale through the Safety Business Gateway, publish an Article 36 recall notice where a recall is needed, check other products made with the same process, components or batch (Article 23(3)), and update the technical file and design.
• Updates and removal. The notifying authority is responsible for the content. Member states notify any update, modification or withdrawal of measures (Article 26(6)), and the Commission updates the portal; a member state may ask the Commission to remove a notification only in duly justified cases (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/3173, Annex I points 4 and 6). If you believe information is wrong or the issue is fixed, contact the notifying authority with evidence.
• Archive after 10 years. Ten years after validation, the published information moves to an archive section of the portal and stays publicly available (Annex I point 6.3).