Google Search is becoming deliberately less feature-rich in Europe as the company tries to satisfy the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
Google has begun rolling out a substantial redesign of European search results that gives rival vertical search services more visibility while removing some information that users previously received directly inside Google, according to Reuters reporting on September 8. Among the most visible changes, real-time prices are being stripped from some carousels for hotels, flights and restaurants.
The result is a search experience shaped not only by Google’s product decisions but by a regulatory requirement to reduce the advantage Google can give its own specialized search features over competing services.
Google is describing the changes in extraordinary terms. The company told Reuters that the redesign represents the largest reduction in Search quality in its 29-year history. That is Google’s assessment of the trade-off, not an independently established measure of search quality, and it sits at the center of a much larger disagreement between the company and European regulators over what fair competition should look like on a dominant search engine.
Booking and Expedia are gaining more visibility inside Google
The DMA is intended in part to prevent designated digital gatekeepers from favoring their own services over competing businesses that depend on the same platform.
For Google Search, one of the most contentious areas has been vertical search: specialized services for hotels, flights, shopping, restaurants and other commercial categories.
Google has historically developed rich search modules that let users compare options without first visiting another website. Those experiences can include maps, photos, ratings, availability and pricing. Rival vertical search services have argued that Google’s ability to place its own modules prominently inside the dominant general search engine gives it an unfair structural advantage.
The new European design gives services such as Booking.com and Expedia more prominent access to those high-intent searches.
Google’s newly updated Search Central documentation for EEA aggregator units describes a multi-provider feature built specifically for Vertical Search Services, or VSSs. Eligible participants include online travel agencies, comparison-shopping services, metasearch engines and directories.
For supported searches, users can see results supplied by an aggregator and switch between eligible providers. Clicks inside the unit lead directly to the selected aggregator’s website.
Google is also showing direct suppliers alongside aggregators
The redesign is not simply replacing Google’s own modules with one intermediary.
Google says it is also displaying supplier units alongside aggregator units to preserve visibility for businesses that sell directly to consumers. That distinction matters because the economic interests of an airline, hotel or restaurant can be very different from those of an online travel agency or comparison site.
A hotel generally prefers a direct booking because it can own the customer relationship and avoid intermediary commissions. An aggregator benefits when the traveler moves through its marketplace.
The DMA compliance problem is therefore not a simple choice between Google and its competitors. Search-result design determines how traffic is distributed among Google, large intermediaries and the underlying businesses themselves.
The new European SERP attempts to give rival comparison services a more explicit place in that distribution.
Real-time prices are part of the functionality being removed
The most tangible user-facing change reported by Reuters is the removal of real-time information such as prices from some Google carousels covering hotels, flights and restaurants.
That is important because real-time pricing transforms a search result from a directory into a decision tool.
If a user can see that one hotel costs €180 and another costs €240 without leaving Google, the comparison can happen directly on the results page. Remove those prices and the user may need to visit an aggregator or supplier website to complete the same task.
Google argues that this creates additional friction. From the regulatory perspective, however, requiring users to leave Google can also create more opportunity for competing vertical search services to attract traffic and participate in the transaction.
The disagreement is therefore partly about where the comparison should happen.
Google calls it the biggest Search-quality reduction in its history
Google’s rhetoric around the rollout is unusually strong.
According to Reuters, the company says the changes represent the most significant reduction in service quality across Search’s 29-year history. Google says users may encounter more friction, including needing to reformulate or repeat searches that previously could be resolved directly inside a rich result.
That characterization should be read as the company’s position in an active regulatory dispute.
There is no universal metric that independently proves the new SERP is the largest quality reduction Google Search has ever experienced. Rival services and European regulators may define quality differently, particularly if a more neutral distribution of traffic is considered a benefit even when it adds steps to the user journey.
This tension is fundamental to the DMA debate: the fastest answer for a consumer and the fairest competitive environment for businesses do not necessarily produce the same interface.
The 30% traffic claim also comes from Google
Google has repeatedly argued that earlier DMA compliance changes have already harmed direct suppliers in Europe.
In a 2024 DMA compliance update, the company said hotel operators had reported free direct booking clicks falling by as much as 30% after the original changes. Google argued that more traffic was being routed through large travel aggregators and comparison sites rather than directly to airlines, hotels, retailers and other businesses.
Google has since repeated the “up to 30%” figure in broader discussions of European tourism and DMA compliance.
The qualifier is important. This is not independently verified evidence that all European businesses lost 30% of their Google traffic, nor is it a uniform measurement across every affected sector. It is a Google-reported figure about losses the company attributes to its earlier compliance changes, originally framed around reports from hotel businesses.
For publishers and marketers, that distinction should remain attached whenever the statistic is cited.
The European Commission has already fined Google over self-preferencing
The latest redesign arrives under significant enforcement pressure.
Reuters reports that the European Commission fined Google €460 million in July over practices regulators considered self-preferencing and warned that additional penalties could follow if the company did not achieve compliance within 60 days.
That makes the September changes more than a product experiment. They are part of Google’s attempt to demonstrate that European search results no longer unfairly privilege its own specialized services over rival vertical search providers.
Google has spent years arguing that rich features are product improvements rather than anticompetitive behavior. European regulators have increasingly focused on whether the dominant search engine can introduce those improvements in a way that does not foreclose competitors.
The new SERP is where those competing interpretations become visible to ordinary users.
The DMA is changing what “ranking” means for travel and local SEO
For SEO teams, the redesign introduces another layer between organic ranking and commercial visibility.
A hotel search in Europe may now include an aggregator unit, a supplier unit, conventional organic results, advertisements and other search features. Being the highest-ranking blue link does not necessarily mean being the most prominent option in the complete user journey.
Travel and local marketers therefore need to measure which search surfaces generate visibility, not simply where a domain ranks organically.
An individual hotel may appear through its own website in a supplier unit while also appearing inside Booking.com or another aggregator. The same property can therefore participate in several competing paths through the SERP.
Understanding which path produces the booking becomes increasingly important as Google redistributes screen space under regulatory pressure.
Aggregators now have a formal Google Search integration path in the EEA
Google’s Search Central documentation makes the new competitive structure unusually explicit.
The company says aggregator units are available in the European Economic Area for searches related to hotels, flights, long-distance trains or buses and products. Eligible VSS providers can express interest in participating and must supply the necessary data while meeting Google’s quality standards.
The units can include rich entity information such as images, ratings and detailed attributes. Google also tells participating providers to keep pricing and availability accurate where those fields are supported.
This creates an important nuance around the Reuters report. Google is removing some real-time pricing functionality from its own familiar rich-result experiences while simultaneously creating structured ways for eligible aggregators to populate dedicated units with useful commercial information.
The story is therefore not simply “prices disappear from Google.” It is that the architecture controlling who supplies and receives visibility for that information is being redesigned.
Direct suppliers may face a more expensive customer-acquisition path
Google’s strongest economic objection to the DMA changes is that they can insert intermediaries between consumers and businesses that previously received free direct traffic from Search.
If a traveler moves from Google to an online travel agency before booking a hotel, the hotel may pay a commission it would not have paid on a direct booking.
That does not automatically mean the DMA harms the hotel. Aggregators can also provide discovery, comparison tools and incremental demand. The net effect depends on how much traffic is redistributed, whether bookings are genuinely incremental and what commissions or acquisition costs are involved.
But the concern explains why direct suppliers should not treat this as a purely regulatory story.
SERP design can change customer-acquisition economics even when a business’s organic ranking remains unchanged.
Users may have to click more—but competitors may get more opportunities
The new European search experience exposes a philosophical disagreement about product quality.
Google has spent decades reducing the number of steps required to answer a question or complete a task. Maps, flight results, hotel pricing, local panels and other rich features are all expressions of that design philosophy.
The DMA introduces a competing objective: a gatekeeper should not use control of the general search layer to unfairly privilege its own downstream services.
A result page that requires one extra click can therefore be worse under a pure convenience metric while potentially being better under a competition metric.
Neither perspective can be reduced to the number of blue links on the page.
The changes apply to Europe, making geographic SERP monitoring essential
The latest redesign applies to EU countries, according to Reuters, continuing a pattern in which European users increasingly receive a different Google Search product from users elsewhere.
That has practical consequences for international SEO.
A travel company checking rankings from the United States may not see the same modules, traffic paths or competitive surfaces experienced by customers in France, Germany, Italy or Spain. Screenshots and rank reports captured outside the affected region can therefore become misleading.
International teams should treat geography as part of SERP measurement rather than assuming Google’s interface is globally uniform.
Regulation is now one of the forces producing regional search products.
This is a redistribution of search power, not just a visual redesign
Removing real-time prices may look like a small interface change. It is not.
Every piece of information shown directly in a search result determines how far the user must travel through the web before making a decision. Every additional intermediary changes who receives the visit, who controls the customer relationship and potentially who gets paid.
The DMA is forcing Google to reconsider those flows in Europe.
Google says the result will be a materially worse Search product and argues that earlier changes have already reduced direct traffic to European businesses. Regulators have taken the opposite concern seriously: that allowing Google to place its own specialized services above competitors can entrench the power of an already dominant gatekeeper.
The latest SERP redesign is the practical compromise—or collision—between those two positions.
For European users, it means some hotel, flight and restaurant searches may provide less real-time information directly inside Google. For Booking.com, Expedia and other vertical services, it means more opportunity to become the layer through which the user completes the comparison. And for direct suppliers, it means watching not only rankings but the route Google now requires customers to take.
Google Search in Europe is not merely changing because of AI or product experimentation. Regulation is now actively deciding which features can appear, who gets visibility and how many steps stand between a search and a transaction.