Google Says EU Search Changes Are the Biggest Quality Drop in Its 29-Year History

Google has told Reuters that changes it is making to European search results, in order to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act and avoid further fines, amount to "the largest reduction in quality of service at the world's most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history."

That is an extraordinary thing for a search engine to say about its own product, and it is worth reading carefully rather than at face value.

What's actually changing

The changes centre on vertical search services — the categories where Google has historically shown its own aggregated results directly in the SERP. Hotels, flights, and restaurants are the clearest examples. In these categories, Google surfaces its own units: hotel booking modules, flight results, local restaurant packs, each pulling structured data and pushing organic results further down.

The DMA's core objection is self-preferencing: a gatekeeper platform using its dominant position in one market to advantage its own downstream services over rivals. Comparison sites, online travel agents, and aggregators have argued for years that Google's own units take the position their listings would otherwise occupy.

Google's compliance response is to change how those categories are presented in the EU. Google's position, per its statement to Reuters, is that removing or demoting these units produces a worse experience — pointing to its own 2024 DMA testing, in which the company says "people were measurably less satisfied with their search results and it took them longer to find hotels."

Reading the statement

Two things are true at once and both belong in your assessment.

First, Google has a direct commercial and regulatory interest in framing DMA compliance as harmful to users. A statement to a news wire, made while negotiating the scope of enforcement and the risk of fines, is advocacy as much as it is a product disclosure. "Largest reduction in quality in 29 years" is a phrase engineered to be quoted, and it is being quoted.

Second, the underlying claim about user behaviour is plausible on its own terms. Removing a fast structured module and replacing it with a list of ten blue links to aggregators genuinely does add steps for a user trying to book a hotel. Whether that constitutes lower quality or simply less convenience delivered by Google specifically is precisely the question the DMA exists to litigate.

You do not have to accept Google's framing to accept that European SERPs in these verticals are about to look materially different.

What this means if you do SEO in the EU

Aggregators and comparison sites in affected verticals stand to gain. If Google's own hotel, flight, or restaurant units are demoted or removed in EU results, the organic space above the fold expands. For travel, hospitality, and local-service comparison sites that have spent a decade competing for the space beneath a Google module, that is the single biggest structural opportunity in years. Position 1 becomes worth what position 1 used to be worth.

Direct brands may lose a distribution channel. A hotel that appears in Google's booking module without ranking organically has been getting visibility it did not earn through SEO. If that module goes, the visibility goes with it, and the fallback is organic and paid performance you may not currently have.

Expect regional divergence to become permanent. Google has published documentation covering regional differences in the Search experience, and the DMA guarantees that EU results will structurally diverge from US and rest-of-world results in these categories. That has practical consequences: rank tracking configured on a US data centre will not describe what an EU user sees, and a single global SERP-feature strategy stops being coherent.

Test and re-baseline rather than assume. These changes roll out over time and by category. Before you rebuild a strategy on the expectation of reclaimed SERP real estate, check the actual results pages for your priority queries from an EU location, and record a baseline now so you can measure what changes.

What to watch

The open questions are scope and timing: which verticals beyond travel and dining are affected, whether the changes are removal or demotion, and whether Google adjusts its approach in response to enforcement decisions. Google has not published a Search Central blog post detailing the changes as SEO guidance, which is itself notable — this is being communicated through press statements and regulatory channels rather than through the documentation SEOs normally rely on.

If you work on European travel, hospitality, local services, or any comparison-shopping vertical, this is worth tracking weekly rather than filing away.

Sources

• Reuters: Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines
• Google Search Central: aggregator features documentation