Google Search has dropped the free product listings and carousel formats from the European Economic Area (EEA). This change is part of what the European Commission forced Google to do in these regions under the Digital Markets Act. Remember, Google called this the biggest reduction in its search quality ever.
And as we covered, Google documented these changes with the new regional differences document.
That being said, Adriaan Dekker via Gabriel Baumgarten posted a screenshot on LinkedIn of how the product results look now in the EEA without those free listings. He wrote, "Free listings from Google Shopping look to be disappearing in the EEA. The space is going to price comparison services (CSS) instead." Those are also known as vertical shopping services (VSS).
Here is that screenshot:
Hugo Huijer from Productrise plotted the data and posted a screenshot as well on LinkedIn. He wrote, "Over the past two days, Google's "popular products" carousels - the organic product blocks that appear for commercial queries - have almost entirely disappeared from search in the European Economic Area.""~90–100% drops in EEA countries, among which we have sufficient data for Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands," he added.
Here is the chart Hugo provided showing this drop off:
So I checked Semrush's chart as well, for "popular products" and it shows the same for countries in those EEA regions:
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed in a comment that Google indeed removed the free product listings because of the DMA ruling in Europe.
Anyway, we all knew this was happening but man, this is a big deal in those regions.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
