Search for “running shoes” from London and Google still shows the familiar product carousel, with images, prices, store names, and a row of free listings pulled from Merchant Center. Run the same search from Amsterdam and that block is gone, replaced by a stacked unit of comparison sites where a click usually lands on an intermediary’s page instead of a retailer’s.
Google removed free product listings and organic product carousels from Search across the European Economic Area (EEA) in mid-September 2026 to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Your feed didn’t break, so fixing it won’t bring the carousel back, because the route Google used to send free product traffic to retailers has been replaced by several routes with different entry rules, different data sources, and different owners inside your organization.
Most of what follows comes from Google’s own Search Central documentation and Merchant Center help pages. What we’ve done is put those pieces together for a team running ecommerce across EEA markets, and the wider story across travel, local, and shopping is in our overview of the 2026 DMA SERP.
On July 23, 2026, the European Commission fined Google a combined €890 million in two DMA non-compliance decisions. Of that, €460 million was for self-preferencing in Search across shopping, hotels, transport, and sports results, and the other €430 million concerned Google Play, with 60 days for Google to comply.
On September 8, Google published Search Central documentation listing new aggregator and supplier units as available to EEA users, and Search Engine Journal reported the redesign the same day. Product results followed about a week later, when free product listings and “popular products” carousels disappeared from EEA Search, as Search Engine Roundtable reported on September 18, adding that Google’s Ads Liaison attributed the removal to the DMA ruling.
Industry coverage put the drop in carousel appearances at roughly 90% to 100% in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden, with no change in the UK, US, or Australia.
Most of what changed for shopping queries in the EEA was either removed or moved, and paid Shopping ads are the main surface that stayed as it was.
| Status | What | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Removed | Free product listings in Search | No longer shown on EEA results pages |
| Removed | Organic product carousels (“popular products”) | Near-total disappearance in the markets measured |
| Changed | Product results layout | A comparison sites unit (Google calls it an aggregator unit) and a supplier unit now appear on qualifying product queries |
| Changed | Google’s own row in the comparison unit | Industry coverage reports it no longer names a store and shows a price with “& more prices” |
| Changed | Shopping tab | Reported as moved out of the main menu and behind “More products” |
| Unchanged | Paid Shopping ads | Industry coverage reports Shopping ads were not removed |
Organic results still appear below the new units, and Google hasn’t announced changes to its ranking systems for the EEA. Crawling and indexing matter as much as they did before, since the supplier unit draws on what Google can crawl from your site.
Paid Shopping ads continue to run in EEA markets, and the UK, Switzerland, and every market outside the EEA keep product carousels and free listings. Product structured data still helps Google understand your catalog, and in the EEA it also powers a separate carousel format that category pages can earn.
The layout may keep changing, too. The Commission is still assessing compliance, and Google has appealed at least one separate DMA requirement, a mandate to share search data with competitors, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
With the format still moving, the lower-risk order of work is to fix measurement first and hold large, hard-to-reverse investments until the layout settles.
On August 24, 2026, three weeks before the EEA carousels disappeared, Google changed how Merchant Center reports traffic, and a team sizing the DMA impact from Merchant Center alone will pick up both changes at once.
According to Google’s Merchant Center reporting updates, the August 24 change did three things:
A comparison of June organic clicks in Merchant Center against October therefore mixes two definitions of “Organic” with two versions of the EEA results page. The same applies to year-over-year Merchant Center comparisons and to any July or August exports saved before the restatement.
Separating the two effects comes down to which tool you use for which comparison, and which market you compare against:
Action Tip: Add annotations for August 24 and mid-September to every dashboard that reports EEA ecommerce traffic, before anyone presents the numbers to leadership.
With Rank Intelligence from seoClarity, you can track SERP features by country and device on a fixed keyword set, so you can see how often product carousels and the new units appear in each EEA market next to a control market.
Free listings gave retailers one route with one entry rule, which was a good feed. The EEA now has several routes, each with its own rules and usually its own owner inside the business.
| Route | How you get in | Data source | When it shows | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregator unit (comparison sites) | Your products are listed by a comparison shopping service (CSS) that Google has approved for the unit | The CSS’s own listings | Qualifying product queries; one CSS is expanded by default, others sit behind a switcher | Paid media or partnerships |
| Supplier unit | No application; crawlable pages serving EEA users | Crawled site content, optionally enhanced by feeds | Only when an aggregator unit also appears | SEO and feed teams |
| Structured data carousel (beta) | Valid ItemList markup with embedded Product items on a category or summary page | Your on-page markup | Eligible product queries in the EEA | SEO, engineering, and merchandising |
| Organic results | Standard ranking | Crawled and indexed pages | All queries | SEO |
| Paid Shopping ads | Paid campaigns | Merchant Center feed | As before | Paid media |
Sources: Google’s regional features documentation and structured data carousels (beta) documentation, plus industry breakdowns of the unit eligibility rules.
The supplier unit gives retailers and brands a direct placement, but it only appears when an aggregator unit triggers for the same query, and Google hasn’t said how it orders suppliers. It’s also crawl-based, so while feeds can enhance a listing, the core data comes from your pages, and if price, availability, or product names on a landing page don’t match your feed, Google sees the page version.
Supplier-side listings also carry less detail than the features they replaced. That makes feed-to-page parity an organic concern as well as a Merchant Center one, and each locale and currency version of a product page should show the same price and availability your feeds report.
Merchants don’t appear in the aggregator unit directly: a shopper clicks a comparison site’s listing, lands on that site’s product page, and only then chooses a retailer.
Many EEA retailers already work with a CSS for Shopping ads, and the open question now is whether those relationships also affect organic visibility, which brings SEO into a decision that used to sit with paid media.
If you’re evaluating CSS partners, four questions cover most of the ground:
Google hasn’t published how it chooses which comparison site to expand, so being listed by a CSS doesn’t guarantee visibility.
Structured data carousels are the one route where every input sits on your own site, and because they’re earned by category and summary pages, the category page becomes the main organic asset for EEA product search.
Google’s structured data carousels (beta) documentation covers products in EEA countries on desktop and mobile, with these requirements:
The feature is in beta, and Google notes that requirements may change.
Across a large catalog, each requirement turns into a decision that belongs to a specific team:
Google’s documentation says that “if a currency is not provided, Google defaults to USD.” For a retailer selling across EEA markets that price in euros, Swedish kronor, Danish kroner, Polish złoty, Czech koruna, Hungarian forint, Romanian leu, Norwegian krone, and Icelandic króna, among others, a template that leaves out priceCurrency could show the wrong currency on every locale.
| Check | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| priceCurrency present | Set on every offer, using ISO 4217 codes (EUR, SEK, PLN, and so on) |
| Currency matches locale | Each country version declares its own currency |
| Price matches page and feed | Markup, visible price, and feed agree for that locale |
| At least three items | Every marked-up page lists three or more unique products |
| Item URLs on the same domain | Each item URL points to a unique page on the summary page’s own domain; no cross-domain or anchor-link URLs |
| Images meet guidelines | Crawlable, product-only, recommended ratios |
Hypothetical checklist for illustration; adapt it to your templates.
Action Tip: Start with the 20 category pages that drive the most EEA non-brand product revenue, validate the markup on those templates, and then roll it out to the rest of the catalog.
To see how the change played out market by market, we looked at Research Grid data for product queries before and after mid-September, alongside non-EEA control markets.
Key Findings Across Verticals:
Market and Query Dynamics:
To dive deeper into the methodology, market-by-market breakdowns, and tracking recommendations, you can read the full study here: SERP Changes in the EEA Under the DMA.
Most of the next 90 days goes into measurement, ownership, and category pages, roughly in this order:
Lead with what changed on the page, then show the measured effect by market against a control, and keep the Merchant Center reporting change separate from the EEA layout change so the two aren’t added together.
The EEA product carousel removal split one feed-driven route into several, each with its own entry rules and owners, and organic product discovery now runs through all of them.
Separating reporting noise from real change, deciding where you’ll compete, and treating category pages as your main EEA asset are the parts your team controls.
A market-by-market baseline is the most useful place to start, and seoClarity’s Rank Intelligence tracks product SERP features by country and device so you can see where EEA results now differ from your control markets.
Schedule a demo to see it with your own keywords.
Google hasn’t said. The Commission is still assessing compliance, and the EEA layout has already changed more than once since early September, so plan for further changes rather than a return to the old format.
Only for the aggregator unit. The supplier unit, structured data carousels, and standard organic results don’t require a CSS.
Yes, though its role in EEA Search has narrowed. It still drives Shopping ads and free listings outside the EEA, and feeds can enhance supplier unit listings, but in EEA organic results, what Google crawls from your pages carries more weight.
No. Prioritize indexable, high-demand category pages that list at least three unique products on the same domain, and because the feature is in beta, validate a few templates first and keep an eye on Google’s documentation for changes.