Google Says Its EU DMA Search Changes Are the Biggest Quality Hit in Its History

Google has rolled out its Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance changes to search results across the EU, and this time it isn't staying quiet about the cost. A Google official told Reuters the update "mark[s] the largest reduction in quality of service at the world's most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history."

What actually changed

The changes target vertical search services (VSS) — the hotel, airline and restaurant comparison results that used to sit inside Google's own dedicated modules. Under the new format:

• The traditional Hotel Local Pack is gone
• One specialised search engine (think Booking.com or Expedia) is now highlighted at the top of the results
• Two more appear below it with less detail
• A carousel of individual hotels, airlines or restaurants sits underneath, with real-time pricing stripped out
• Rankings in that carousel are still determined by Google's own algorithm

In effect, price comparison sites — the vertical search services the DMA was written to protect — get more prominent placement, while businesses that were previously listed directly with a link, phone number and address lose visibility.

The data Google is pointing to

This isn't Google's first attempt to make this case. It ran the same format as a test back in 2024 and reported the results to the European Commission at the time:

• Users were measurably less satisfied with search results
• It took people longer to find hotels, including doing more searches
• More users gave up without finding what they were looking for
• Overall traffic to hotels and intermediary sites declined
• Hotels lost more than 10% of traffic — affecting hundreds of thousands of European hotels
• Traffic to the intermediary sites stayed largely flat

The European Commission wasn't moved by that data in 2024, and the changes are going ahead regardless. Google has also published a new support document on regional search result differences covering how aggregator features now vary by market.

Worth noting

Google's chosen quality metric here — traffic to hotel websites, and fewer searches needed to get there — is the same standard it doesn't apply to itself elsewhere. AI Overviews and AI Mode routinely reduce click-through to the underlying sites and can require more follow-up searches, without Google framing that as a quality reduction. It's a useful reminder that "quality," in Google's own telling, tends to be measured however suits the point being made.

For hotels, airlines, restaurants and any business relying on those vertical listings for EU visibility, this is a direct hit to referral traffic that's worth checking in your own GSC and analytics data over the coming weeks.

The other side of the trade

Every unit Google demotes is space something else occupies. For price comparison sites, online travel agents and aggregators — the businesses the DMA was written to protect — this is the biggest structural opening in EU search in years. If you have spent a decade ranking beneath a Google module in travel, hospitality or local services, position one is about to be worth what position one used to be worth. It is worth baselining your EU rankings now, before the change fully lands, so you can measure what you actually gain.

The flip side is that direct brands lose a distribution channel they never earned through SEO. A hotel that appeared in Google's booking module without ranking organically was getting visibility for free; when the module goes, so does the visibility, and the fallback is organic and paid performance many of those businesses have not had to build.

One practical consequence for everyone: EU results now diverge structurally from US and rest-of-world results in these categories, and that divergence is permanent. Rank tracking configured against a US data centre will not describe what an EU searcher sees. If you report on EU visibility, check where your tracking actually resolves before you trust the next month of data.

Sources

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