On Tuesday 8 September 2026 Google switched on a redesigned results page for hotel, flight and restaurant searches across the EU and told Reuters it was the largest reduction in quality of service in its 29-year history. The Google DMA search changes put a comparison service at the top of the page, two more beneath it and a carousel of individual businesses below that, with live prices removed. Google says users outside the EU will not see any of it.
“To comply with DMA requirements, we’re making significant changes to Search in Europe,” said Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president for knowledge and information, in the statement reported by Reuters. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans, boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day.”
Why Google changed search results in the EU now
The trigger is a fine. On 23 July 2026 the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act: €460 million for self-preferencing in Google Search, where the Commission found Google displayed its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results more prominently than rivals, and €430 million for anti-steering rules on Google Play. Google was given 60 days to bring the non-compliance to an end, and Reuters notes the Commission can add periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of worldwide turnover if it does not.
This is the third round of DMA rework for Search in Europe. Engadget’s timeline runs from Google’s first compliance plan in March 2024, through the Commission’s investigation opened the same month, to an offer of further modifications in October 2025 that did not satisfy Brussels. Search Engine Roundtable recalls Google’s own account of a 2024 test of plainer hotel results, in which users were less satisfied, took longer to find what they wanted, and hotel traffic fell by more than 10 percent.
The August decision to stop enforcing site reputation abuse penalties in the EEA, which we covered in Google’s EEA site reputation policy change, came from the same pressure. The difference is scale: that change touched a spam policy; this one rewrites the results page for whole industries.
What the new EU results page looks like
Reuters describes the layout that went live on 8 September. For a query such as “hotels in Lisbon” or “flights to Berlin”:
- One vertical search service sits at the top of the page. Comparison and booking platforms such as Booking.com and Expedia are the obvious candidates; Google’s algorithm still decides which one.
- Two more vertical services follow with less detail.
- A carousel of individual hotels, airlines or restaurants comes next, showing a link to the business’s website, its telephone number and address. Real-time prices, previously the main reason to click, are gone from that carousel.
Search Engine Roundtable adds what disappeared: the traditional hotel local pack is gone, replaced by a multi-provider module for platforms such as Booking.com, Expedia and Priceline and a separate module listing individual hotel websites. Clicking the map in the results no longer opens Google Maps.
Google’s own documentation is the most useful source for site owners. Its Search Central page “Regional differences in Search experience”, updated on 8 September, lists the units that now exist only in the European Economic Area: an aggregator unit for hotels, flights, ground transportation and products; a supplier unit for direct providers in the same categories; an ecosystem carousel for weather, sports, finance and translation queries; a job sites feature linking to job aggregators; and structured data carousels that a site can enter only with valid markup. The same page documents parallel changes in Türkiye and South Africa, a reminder that the DMA is not the only regulator asking for this.
Who wins and who loses from the Google DMA search changes
Google’s framing is that intermediaries win and local businesses lose. The number it offers is its own: free direct booking clicks to European businesses are down as much as 30 percent since the original DMA changes, Google told Reuters, and it expects the new layout to hit the same businesses again. No underlying data has been published, and the figure comes from the company that just lost a fine, so we treat it as a claim rather than a measurement.
The comparison platforms get the top of the page, which is what the DMA complaints asked for. Hotels, airlines and restaurants that used to appear with a price in Google’s own unit now sit lower, without a price, one click further from the booking. The Commission has not said whether the new layout satisfies the July decision; that verdict is the next event to watch.
What it means for your business
If you sell hotel rooms, flights, tables or tickets directly, your search visibility just changed shape. The first thing to do is measure it, not guess. Compare Search Console clicks and impressions for your brand and category queries in EU countries for the week from 8 September against the previous four weeks, and separate branded from generic terms. A drop on generic queries with stable branded demand tells you the new layout, not your site, is the cause. That comparison starts any SEO work we do after a platform change: the fix depends on which queries moved.
Structured data is now the entry ticket, not a nice-to-have. Google’s regional documentation makes the carousels conditional on markup, and the supplier unit is the only place a direct provider appears above the fold in these categories. Validate your hotel, restaurant, event or product schema, check that prices, availability and opening hours in the markup match the page, and fix the crawl errors that silently exclude a listing. That groundwork belongs in website projects, because it lives in templates.
Decide what the intermediaries are worth to you. If Booking.com or Expedia now sits above you on your own category, some of your direct bookings will move there and come back with a commission attached. Look at the share of bookings by channel before and after 8 September, and reprice your position on those platforms accordingly. Where the margin cannot carry the commission, paid search on your own brand and category terms is the lever that still sits above the organic page; our paid advertising campaigns for travel and hospitality clients usually start with exactly that defensive brand layer.
Everyone else: check the categories you did not think were yours. The aggregator unit covers products and ground transportation as well as travel, the ecosystem carousel touches weather, sports and finance, and the job sites feature affects any company that lists vacancies. If part of your organic traffic came through one of those features, the same measurement applies.
Do not build for this week’s layout. Google has now redesigned these results three times under the DMA, and the same documentation page already carries regional variants for two more countries. Our view is that the durable assets are the ones that survive every layout: complete structured data, a fast site that converts the click it gets, and a booking flow that gives people a reason to come direct. The rest is a page template that Google, or Brussels, will change again.
