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Google Rebuilds European Search Results for Hotels, Flights and Products

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Cartoon illustration of a round character in Google's four brand colours, wearing a baseball cap and a sandwich-board placard lettered WORST IN 29 YEARS, its mouth a flat resigned line. It stands beside a free-standing board showing a search results page on which two pale blue panels, each holding a row of white cards, sit above three rows of plain unframed text.
The two blue panels are the new aggregator and supplier units. Google says the EEA redesign is the largest reduction in quality of service in Search's 29-year history. Illustration: AI-generated.

Search for “hotels in Paris” from inside the European Economic Area and, since 8 September 2026, the results page carries two blocks that were not there before.

The first is a box of hotel listings drawn from a single comparison site: a map with nightly prices pinned to it, a short list of hotels with photos, star ratings and rates, and a button reading “Browse on” that site. Rival comparison sites sit collapsed in rows underneath, each one expandable in place, so the box swaps over to their listings. Google calls this the aggregator unit.

Mock-up of Google's aggregator unit. A bordered card headed Hotels | Paris with the dates 26 to 30 August and 2 guests beneath it. One comparison site is named and expanded, showing a map with four nightly prices pinned to it, then three hotels with a flat colour illustration standing in for the photo, a name, a star rating and a nightly rate each, then a full-width Browse on that site button. Three rival comparison sites sit collapsed below as domain rows with down chevrons, and a View more row closes the card.
Mock-up of the aggregator unit, drawn from the illustration in Google's documentation. Only one comparison site fills the box at a time; the rivals underneath expand in place and swap the listings over.

The second is headed “Hotel websites”. It is a swipeable row of cards, one card per hotel, each with a photo, amenity icons, a “from” price and a link to that hotel’s own website. Google calls this the supplier unit.

Mock-up of Google's supplier unit. A bordered card headed Hotel websites with the dates 26 to 30 August and 2 guests beneath it, containing a horizontal row of four hotel cards that runs off the right edge of the frame. Each card carries a flat colour illustration standing in for the photo, the hotel name, two amenity icons with labels, the hotel's own domain, a from price and a More details button. Dot pagination sits below the row, with a full-width Map button beneath that.
Mock-up of the supplier unit, which Google heads "Hotel websites" on hotel queries. Each card links to the hotel's own site. Shown alone here; on a live results page it appears only beneath an aggregator unit.

“Unit” is Google’s own word for a bordered block on a results page that groups several results together, as against a single blue link. You already know several: the local pack is a unit, so is the shopping carousel. What is new here is who fills them. One is for the middlemen, the comparison sites; the other is for the businesses themselves. Both occupy space Google used to fill with its own travel and shopping products.

Does this affect the UK?

No. The European Economic Area is the 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The United Kingdom left it on 31 December 2020, at the end of the post-Brexit transition period, and Switzerland has never been a member. Google’s documentation scopes both units to users in the EEA, and Google told Reuters that users outside the EU are unaffected. A search run from Manchester returns the same page it did last week.

Eligibility, though, is keyed to who a site serves rather than where it is registered. Google’s stated requirement for the supplier unit is that “your website must serve users in the EEA”, so a UK hotel or retailer selling into Europe can appear in a unit that its own domestic customers will never see.

What changed, and why now

This is the remedy behind the European Commission’s €460 million self-preferencing fine in July, the search half of an €890 million Digital Markets Act package. The Commission found that Google gave its own shopping, travel and transport results more prominence than comparable third-party services, and gave it 60 days to stop, a window that runs into late September.

The two units are Google’s answer: rather than demote its own products, it has built dedicated space for the competitors that complained.

Who can appear in each unit

Google published documentation for both units on 8 September, alongside a regional features hub listing which features exist in the EEA, Türkiye and South Africa, who qualifies for each and how to take part. Until now that meant piecing together blog posts and changelog entries going back more than two years.

The two paths are not comparable in cost.

  • Aggregator unit. The site must be approved as a Vertical Search Service and supply data through a feed or a real-time API. Hotel aggregators provide a lodging feed, flight and transport aggregators connect through APIs, local directories provide a point-of-interest feed carrying name, address, phone, category, images and ratings, and product aggregators go through the Comparison Shopping Services programme. Google takes expressions of interest through two forms linked from its aggregator unit documentation: a Search aggregator features form for ground transport, flight, hotel and local business queries, and the Comparison Shopping Services contact form for products. This is the path with real engineering work behind it.
  • Supplier unit. A direct provider qualifies with a crawlable site serving EEA users. Google states that no data beyond what web crawling already reaches is required, though a feed can enrich the card. There is no application to make.
  • Structured data carousels. A separate regional feature, and the one in the hub that Google gates on markup: an ItemList combined with a supported LocalBusiness, Product or Event type, on a summary page covering at least three entities and linking out to a detail page for each.

Both units run on the same query types: hotels, flights, long-distance trains or buses, products and, since 18 September, local businesses. The supplier unit carries a further condition that is easy to miss. It appears only when an aggregator unit appears, so a direct provider cannot secure it on its own merits; if no approved comparison site fills the box above, there is no card row underneath.

Google’s definition of a direct provider covers individual hotels and airlines, but also brick-and-mortar business owners and service providers such as plumbers. Those local categories can now appear: on 18 September Google’s changelog recorded that both units support local business queries, which a Google Actions Center page describes as dining, services such as beauty salons, and things to do such as attractions. Directories applying for the local aggregator unit use the same interest form as hotel and transport aggregators plus the point-of-interest feed above; a local business itself needs nothing beyond a crawlable site. The Actions Center page says the aggregator unit “replaces existing units” on local results without naming them, and neither Search Central page mentions the local pack or Business Profiles, so what a local business loses in exchange for its supplier card is not documented.

Update, 21 September 2026: When first published, this section said the local categories could not appear yet because the units did not run on local-service queries. Google added local business queries to both units on 18 September 2026, and the passage above now describes that.

The units are also not the whole of the hub. The EEA table carries an ecosystem carousel for weather, sports, finance and translation queries, and a “Job sites” carousel and refinement chip for job queries.

Why Google says search quality will fall

Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president of knowledge and information, told Reuters the company is making “significant changes to Search in Europe” to meet DMA requirements, and that these “degrade the user experience for Europeans, boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day.” Google described the redesign as the largest reduction in quality of service in Search’s 29-year history.

One figure from that account needs care. Google told Reuters that earlier DMA compliance changes cut free direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%. That is Google’s own number, and it describes the earlier changes rather than this rollout, so it is not a measured effect of the aggregator and supplier units.

What the EEA redesign means for your search visibility

For hotel, flight, transport and product queries served to EEA users, visibility now depends partly on which side of the aggregator line a site sits. A comparison site gets a box that surfaces its own listings inside Search, but only after approval and the feed or API work that entry requires. A direct provider gets a card with nothing more than a crawlable site, and no way to make it appear when the aggregator box above it does not.

If you track rankings or read Search Console for EEA countries on these query types, expect the numbers to describe a different results page from the one the same queries return in the US or the UK. Country-filtered Search Console data, once there are a few weeks of it, will be the first real read on how traffic has moved.

Update: free product listings gone across the EEA (September 2026)

The redesign also removed something. Over 16 to 18 September 2026, Google’s free product listings and “popular products” carousels, the organic product blocks that appeared for commercial queries, disappeared from EEA results. Hugo Huijer of Productrise, a product-feed consultancy, plotted their visibility falling by 90 to 100% in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, the five countries where his tracking set was large enough to read, and Semrush Sensor’s “popular products” feature tracking showed the same drop in the same countries. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, confirmed in a LinkedIn comment that Google removed the free listings because of the DMA decision.

For a retailer that reported organic product-listing traffic from EEA countries, that line has gone rather than moved: the space now belongs to the aggregator unit, filled by approved Comparison Shopping Services, and the retailer’s own route back into the results page is the supplier unit beneath it. Both figures above come from third-party trackers of a few countries each, not from Google, so treat the size of the drop as an estimate and the direction as confirmed.

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