Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Google removed free product listings and carousels from search results across the European Economic Area, citing compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The rollout hit fast, with popular product carousels dropping by roughly 90 to 100 percent in countries including Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands within a two-day window. Paid comparison shopping and vertical shopping services now occupy the space free listings used to fill.
Two days. That’s how long it took for free product listings to functionally disappear from Google search results across the European Economic Area, a change Google itself has reportedly described internally as one of the biggest reductions in its search quality it has ever made.
The trigger is the Digital Markets Act, the EU regulation designed to curb self-preferencing by large platforms. Google’s Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, confirmed the connection directly, telling reporters the company removed free product listings specifically because of the DMA ruling in Europe. In place of the free carousels, EEA users are now seeing paid comparison shopping services and vertical shopping services fill the same visual real estate that organic product results used to occupy. Comparison shopping services, or CSS providers, are Google-approved third parties that bid for shopping placements on merchants’ behalf, and vertical shopping services work similarly but for a narrower product category.
The scale of the drop is what makes this notable rather than routine. Popular product carousels fell by somewhere between 90 and 100 percent across Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands, all within a 48-hour window, according to data compiled by industry trackers. That’s not a gradual algorithm adjustment merchants can adapt to over a few weeks. It’s closer to a light switch.
For merchants who built visibility strategies around ranking in Google’s free Shopping results, this is a genuine problem, not a minor inconvenience. Products that showed up in organic shopping carousels without any ad spend now have no equivalent placement. The paid alternatives, comparison shopping services and vertical shopping services, come with their own costs and their own qualification requirements, meaning smaller merchants who relied on free visibility are the ones most exposed.
The regulatory irony here
The DMA was built to reduce Google’s ability to favor its own products and services over competitors in search results. The removal of free listings is, in a strange way, Google complying with that goal while producing an outcome that looks worse for the merchants the rule was partly meant to protect. Free organic visibility is gone. What replaced it requires payment, which tilts outcomes toward merchants with bigger ad budgets, not away from them. Whether that’s an intended consequence of the DMA’s design or an unintended one depends on who at the European Commission you ask, and neither answer changes what merchants are dealing with today.
If your Shopping traffic from the EEA cratered this week, this is why, and it’s not a penalty or a technical error on your end. The immediate options are limited: evaluate whether paid comparison shopping service placement makes financial sense for your margins, and if it doesn’t, lean harder into organic web search optimization and other channels, since the Shopping carousel real estate isn’t coming back through free means anytime soon.
Bottom Line
Google didn’t choose this outcome so much as it chose the version of DMA compliance that was cheapest and fastest to implement, and regulatory compliance rarely produces a smooth transition for the businesses caught in the middle. European merchants who depended on free Shopping visibility lost it in under 48 hours, and the paid alternatives now standing in that gap don’t come free for anyone.
