Google puts comparison sites above hotels in Europe
Hotels, airlines and restaurants get pushed below three comparison engines in EU results, and Google says quality drops because of it.
Google has changed how search results look in the EU, and it told Reuters the changes mark "the largest reduction in quality of service" at the search engine in its 29 year history. Glenn Gabe posted the report first and Barry Schwartz picked it up. The changes are Google's way of complying with the DMA, the EU rules it has to follow to avoid fines.
Google rolls out changes to search results in the EU to comply with the DMA, saying they mark the largest reduction in quality of service in Search's history
What the new results look like
One price comparison site sits at the top of the page. A price comparison site, called a vertical search service, is a site like Expedia that searches lots of businesses at once. Two more comparison sites follow with fewer details. Below those sits a carousel of hotels, airlines or restaurants, with key features like real-time prices stripped out. Google says rankings within all of this are still decided by its algorithm.
Per the Reuters quotes Gabe shared, the setup favors comparison sites over the actual businesses in those sectors, the ones listed with just a link to their site, a phone number and an address. So a hotel that ranked on its own name now appears lower and with less information attached.
The part Google's own critics noticed
Barry Schwartz pointed out the awkward bit. Google is measuring quality here by how much traffic reaches hotel websites and by how many searches users have to run to get an answer. Those are the same two things AI Overviews, the AI answers at the top of results, are widely said to make worse.
Google has also published a new help page about regional differences in the Google Search experience, which Schwartz flagged. Glenn Gabe quoted it saying Google is evolving the results page for certain queries to create new opportunities for vertical search services, comparison shopping services, direct suppliers and content providers.
One SEO, Gagan Ghotra, replied that Google should enforce its site reputation abuse rules outside the EU too, arguing that would improve results a lot. That is his opinion, not a Google plan.
Who this hits
This only applies to search results in the EU. If you run a hotel, a restaurant, a travel business or anything else that shows up in those carousels and you get EU traffic, expect fewer clicks from people who used to find you directly. Open Google Analytics or Search Console, filter your traffic to EU countries, and note where your clicks sit now so you have a baseline to compare against in a month. If you do not serve EU customers, do nothing.
I do find it funny that Google measures quality here by traffic to the hotel web sites and based on having to do more searches.