Breaking: Google's product carousels are disappearing from search in the EEA (European Economic Area)

Something changed in European search results over the past few days, and it is a big one. Google's organic product carousels, the "popular products" blocks that show up for commercial queries, have largely disappeared from search results across the European Economic Area. For anyone who sells products online in Europe, this is one of the most significant shifts to how search results are structured in years.

We track product carousels for thousands of queries every day, and the drop is impossible to miss. In the EEA countries where we have enough data to be confident, product carousels have fallen off a cliff, dropping by roughly 90 to 100 percent in a matter of days. Outside the EEA, in countries like the UK, the US and Australia, nothing has changed at all. The contrast between the two groups is stark.

This did not come out of nowhere. Google announced a redesign of its European search results on September 8, framed as a response to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). What we are seeing in the data looks like that redesign reaching product queries. Below, I will walk through exactly what we are tracking, the regulatory background behind it, what other people across Europe are reporting, and what I think it means for online sellers and for Productrise users. This story is still developing, so treat the numbers as a snapshot of a fast-moving situation.

What is happening: product carousels are disappearing across the EEA

Let me start with the data, because it is the clearest way to see the change.

The chart below compares two groups of countries. On top, holding steady near their usual levels, are non-EEA countries: the UK, the US and Australia. Below them, dropping sharply toward zero around September 15 to 16, are five EEA countries where we track enough queries to show the change with confidence: Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden.

To put the drop in context: historically, around 85 percent of the commercial-intent queries we track have triggered at least one organic product carousel. You can see the long-running trend on our tracker for search results with organic product carousels. In the affected EEA countries, that number has now collapsed to near zero, practically overnight.

So what has replaced them? In place of the familiar product carousel, EEA searchers are now seeing a unit that Google labels "Comparison Sites." It lists several comparison shopping services, each in its own expandable row, with one provider expanded by default.

Here is what that looks like for a search like "airfryer," with the first comparison site expanded and the others collapsed below it.

There are two important things to understand about this unit.

First, the comparison services listed here (names like Redbrain, Shoparize and Bigshopper in our example) are not sourced from Google's Shopping Graph. When you click one of these product listings, you are taken directly to that comparison site's own product page, not to a Google product view. In other words, Google is handing the click to a third-party aggregator rather than surfacing the underlying sellers itself.

Second, Google itself appears as one of the "comparison sites" in the list. Expanding Google's own section brings back something that looks a lot like the product carousels we were seeing before this update. Clicking a listing there opens the product knowledge panel on the side, which does pull from the Shopping Graph and shows multiple sellers for the same product.

One detail worth pointing out in that screenshot: the product listings inside Google's own section no longer show a seller directly on the card. Instead of a store name, you see a price and a "& more prices" label. The Shopping Graph data is still there, but it now sits a click or two deeper than it used to.

The background: the DMA, a fine, and a redesigned EEA search page

To understand why this is happening, you have to look at Google's ongoing fight with EU regulators.

The change traces back to the EU's Digital Markets Act, the regulation that designates large platforms as "gatekeepers" and prohibits them from giving preferential treatment to their own services. According to Search Engine Journal's reporting, the European Commission fined Google 460 million euros on July 23 for giving its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results more prominence than comparable third-party services, part of a wider 890 million euro package. The Commission gave Google 60 days to comply, with the threat of further periodic penalties if it did not.

Google's response arrived on September 8, when it rolled out redesigned search results in the EEA and, unusually, told users up front that the new layout is worse. Google told Reuters that the changes are "the largest reduction in quality of service in Search's 29-year history." Google's position, in short, is that removing self-preferencing also removes helpful features that people and businesses relied on, and that the DMA is forcing its hand.

The same day, Google updated its Search Central documentation to describe these new "regional differences in Search experience."

If you dig into that documentation update, you find the mechanics behind what we are seeing. Google's new regional search features page describes a few different building blocks for the EEA, and two of them matter most for products:

• An aggregator unit, which gives visibility to "ecosystem participants" such as comparison shopping services, online travel agencies, metasearch engines and directories. This is the "Comparison Sites" unit in the screenshots above.
• A supplier unit, which gives direct suppliers (the brands and retailers themselves) a placement, but only appears alongside the aggregator unit.

There is also a third path that is more interesting from an SEO perspective. Google's structured data carousels (beta) let a site earn its own horizontal "host carousel" by adding ItemList structured data combined with Product markup on a category or summary page that links out to individual product pages on the same domain. This feature is available in the EEA (and Türkiye and South Africa) for product queries, among others. Note what this is and is not: this carousel is earned through structured data on your own website pages, not through your Merchant Center product feed. Those remain two separate systems, and this new unit leans on the structured data side.

What we are seeing across Europe

I am not the only one watching this unfold. This started as a shared observation with people across the European SEO community, and I want to give credit where it is due. Thanks to Christian Kunz and Mathias Noyez for flagging this early.

Here is my own post from when we first shared the data.

Mathias Noyez, founder of the Belgian SEO agency Depends and a Productrise user, posted about the same change from the Belgian market. His post is in Dutch, so here is the gist for readers who do not speak it.

Mathias noticed a clear drop in organic product grids across several European countries, with Google increasingly replacing them with comparison website listings, likely as a result of EU legislation. Together with us, he dug into a broader set of keywords to check whether the pattern held up beyond a handful of searches, and it did.

His take is that if this continues, it may have a real impact on the number of organic clicks going straight to product detail pages, something sellers would probably also see reflected in their organic clicks reporting in Merchant Center. He also raised an interesting point: this could mean category pages become more important again within organic search.

That last point lines up with the structured data carousels beta I mentioned above, where the eligible page is a category or summary page rather than an individual product page. It is too early to say how that plays out, but it is worth keeping an eye on.

Paul Schreiner, an ecommerce SEO in Germany, reported the same shift from the German market and caught two details worth adding. His post is in German, so here is the gist.

First, he spotted a display bug: clicking the first tile in the unit throws an error while the others work, and the product knowledge panel sidebar glitches. That is a little troubling, though early rollouts are rarely clean, so it may just be a rough edge that gets ironed out.

Second, he confirmed the classic Shopping tab has been removed from the top menu, but not actually deleted. You can still reach it by appending &udm=28 or &tbm=shop to the search URL.

What I make of these changes

This hits organic visibility for EEA sellers hard

First and foremost, this heavily impacts organic visibility for any ecommerce brand selling products in the EEA. Product carousels and Google's Shopping Graph have played a large part in the customer journey, especially when it comes to easily comparing multiple sellers, products, prices, reviews and more.

The Shopping Graph is genuinely one of the most impressive pieces of infrastructure in commerce search. It ranks more than 60 billion product listings in real time, with over 2 billion of them refreshed every hour. I wrote about how it works in our Shopping Graph explainer. There is really no substitute for it, and having it pushed behind an aggregator selector changes the experience considerably.

These changes are ongoing, not the final version

I do not think what we are seeing today is where this ends. As Search Engine Journal noted, the Commission said it would monitor how Google implements these changes, and the 60-day window it set on July 23 runs into late September.

That window is running out, and Google has a long track record of continuously adjusting its search results. My best guess is that the current layout is a starting point rather than an endpoint, and that product visibility in the EEA may change again in the coming weeks or months.

The current version is not great for users

This is where I agree with Google's own framing: the current version is not great for users. Most of the comparison websites getting good placements right now cannot match the experience of Google's Shopping Graph. There are often no good product images, no user reviews, and no easy multi-seller price comparison.

There is also a structural issue worth naming. Many comparison and affiliate sites earn revenue on the clicks and sales they refer, which can create an incentive to steer people toward whichever seller pays the most, rather than the best or cheapest option.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has previously taken enforcement action over exactly this pattern in the hotel booking market, where it found that search results could be influenced by the commission a business pays the site, and secured commitments to make that clearer to users. The practice even has a name, "commission-influenced ranking," and it remains on regulators' radar under newer consumer law.

I want to be careful here: those cases are about travel and hotel comparison sites specifically, not the particular product comparison sites now showing up in the EEA. But the underlying incentive is the same, and it is a fair reason to be skeptical that this is a better deal for shoppers. In that sense, Google may well be right that the experience is worse.

A word on AI Mode

AI Mode is now rolled out across several Google products, and non-EEA countries are ahead of the curve there. In the EEA, the Shopping Graph does not appear to be connected to AI Mode's results, which I suspect is Google being cautious with respect to the DMA.

This is also why our previous AI Mode studies have focused only on the US and UK for their data. If you want the background, we found that AI Mode shows around 95 percent fewer product listings than traditional search on the same queries, and that it tends to surface the same products at higher prices. How AI Mode and this EEA redesign eventually fit together is one of the more interesting open questions here.

What this means for Productrise users

Because this only affects one part of the world, the practical impact depends on where you and your products are.

If you are outside the EEA, this update has no effect on you whatsoever. Productrise will keep tracking your products in search, AI Overviews and AI Mode exactly as before. Nothing changes.

If you are in the EEA, this update from Google will affect your organic visibility. Right now, we are seeing roughly a 95 percent drop in product carousel listings, and that may reach 100 percent over the coming days as the update finishes rolling out.

I want to be straight with you about what this means for the data too. The search features now showing up across the EEA are less valuable, both from a click perspective and from a data perspective.

A lot of what makes Productrise powerful comes from the rich signals we track directly from Google's Shopping Graph: product titles, seller changes, discounts and more. Those inputs are what help you shape a smart optimization strategy. With the current version of product search features in the EEA, that added value is severely cut down for now.

None of that changes the fact that the rest of Productrise remains fully available, with all of its benefits intact: product feed audits, supplemental feed generation, Merchant Center integration and analytics, and much more. And your feed quality matters as much as ever, arguably more, if structured data carousels become the new way to earn a spot.

This story does not end here. We will monitor the situation closely and react when new opportunities appear.

Looking ahead

Here is where things stand. Google's organic product carousels have largely vanished from EEA search results, replaced by aggregator units featuring comparison sites, with Google's own Shopping Graph data demoted behind a selector. The trigger appears to be the DMA, the layout is one Google itself calls a step down in quality, and the compliance window with the Commission is still open. This is very likely a moving target, not a finished picture.

For sellers, the immediate takeaway is not to panic, but to pay attention. Watch your EEA organic clicks in Merchant Center, keep your product data and structured data clean, and think about whether your category pages are set up to earn one of the newer structured data carousels. For everyone outside the EEA, it is business as usual.

We will keep tracking this every day and share updates as the picture develops. If you want to see where your own products stand in Google's search results, you can start tracking for free. No credit card required, and you can watch this play out in your own data as it happens.