Credit: Mijansk786 / Shutterstock Google changed how search works in Europe on Tuesday. Then it told everyone the new version is worse. Foo Yun Chee reported the rollout for Reuters, which had the story first. The company is complying with an order from the European Commission, and it is doing so while describing the result as the biggest quality drop in the 29-year history of its search engine.
That characterisation came from a Google official who was not named. The layout is the remedy. One specialised search engine now sits at the top of the page. Two more follow it with fewer details attached.
Below those comes a carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants, and Google has stripped features out of it, including real-time prices. Google’s algorithm still decides the order. What Brussels actually ordered In July the Commission fined Google €460m for favouring its own services in shopping, hotels, transport and sports results. The finding was self-preferencing, which the Digital Markets Act prohibits for designated gatekeepers.
The Commission gave the company 60 days to fix it. Miss that window and the penalty becomes periodic, at up to 5% of total worldwide turnover. So Tuesday is a deadline being met, not a change of heart. Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president for knowledge and information, said the company is making “significant changes to Search in Europe”.
He said those changes “degrade the user experience for Europeans” by “boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses”. He added that “users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes”. Who gains, on Google’s account Google says the Commission pitched this as levelling the field for advertisers. Google says the effect is different.
In its telling, the winners are price comparison sites, or vertical search services, in categories such as hotels, airlines and restaurants. Expedia and Booking.com are the examples it offers. The argument is worth taking seriously, because it is not obviously wrong. A small hotel in Porto appears in these results as a link, a phone number and an address.
An intermediary appears as a product with inventory behind it. Give the intermediary the prominent slot and the hotel pays a commission to reach a customer who was already looking for it. That is a real critique of the remedy. It is also a critique that happens to serve Google, which spent a decade arguing that comparison sites should not get preferential placement.
Every number in this story belongs to Google Three claims are doing the persuasive work here, and Google is the only source for all three. The first is that earlier DMA changes cut free direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%. The company has not published the underlying data or the comparison period. The second is that it tested the new layout with millions of European users and found high dissatisfaction, with people retyping queries to find what they wanted.
The methodology is not public either. The third is the 29-year record claim, which came from an unnamed official rather than an on-record executive. None of this means the figures are wrong. It means nobody outside Google can check them, and that matters more than usual, because Google both designed the interface and is grading it.
A company that dislikes a remedy has the means to implement it joylessly and the incentive to say so loudly. The new block already carries a disclaimer There is a detail from the earlier DMA booking widgets that complicates the picture. Radu Oncescu spotted a notice attached to those blocks in EU regions and posted a screenshot on X. Barry Schwartz reported it for Search Engine Roundtable on Monday.
The notice reads: “This price was customised by the booking partner based on factors such as your device type.” So a price shown inside a DMA compliance widget is not necessarily the price the next person sees. It is set by the intermediary, and it varies by at least one attribute of the person searching. Google does not say what the other factors are. Two cautions.
This was observed on the booking widgets already running, and Reuters has not established that it is the same surface as Tuesday’s carousel. And the disclosure describes what partners do, not what Google does. Even hedged, it sits awkwardly next to the remedy’s purpose. Brussels moved comparison sites up the page so buyers could compare.
A comparison is harder to trust when the numbers are personalised and the real-time prices have been removed. What the Commission has not said The Commission’s reasoning appears in this story only as Google describes it. No official response to Tuesday’s rollout has been reported, and none should be inferred from its absence. That gap is the story’s real limit.
The DMA obliges the gatekeeper to write its own compliance, which means the regulated company controls the first draft of what compliance looks like. Brussels then decides whether the draft is adequate. On this occasion the draft arrives with a warning label attached by its author. Google has now accumulated €10.38bn in EU antitrust penalties over nearly two decades.
The fines have also become a diplomatic matter, with US President Donald Trump threatening an investigation into what he called the bloc’s “robbing” of American companies. What to watch Three things settle whether Google’s warning was accurate or tactical. Whether the Commission accepts the layout as compliant, which is the only test that carries a fine behind it. Whether European hotels and airlines report the traffic collapse Google is forecasting, since they can measure it independently and have no reason to shield Google if it happens.
And whether the layout stays this austere once the deadline pressure lifts. The pattern is familiar by now. Google stopped demoting EU publishers under its spam policy in August, also under DMA pressure. Brussels is separately asking publishers whether the AI opt-out it won is worth anything.
A US court declined to break up the ad exchange that the Commission wants sold. Rivals keep testing the law’s edges, and Opera lost its case over Edge in September. Android users found a silently installed app that sits outside the uninstall rules. Each remedy lands.
Each one lands in a shape the gatekeeper chose. Tuesday is the first time the shape came with a press statement explaining how much you are going to dislike it. Also tagged with
