The company has been accused of favoring its own content in search engine results.
Google has announced that it will change its search services in the EU to avoid part of the €890 million (~$1 billion) in fines imposed by the European Commission earlier this summer. The EU has imposed a fine of 460 million euros (~$534 million) over allegations that Google abused its dominant position in search to prioritize the brand’s other services when displaying query results.
The sanction was the latest salvo between the EU government and a US technology company for violating its Digital Markets Act. The debate centers on the DMA’s requirement that big tech brands “shall not treat their own services more favorably than third-party services.”
Google first outlined some of the changes it planned to make to its services in response to the Digital Markets Act in March 2024. Later that month, however, the EC said it was investigating the company, along with Apple and Meta, for continuing to favor their own services with practices such as placing Google Flights information above competitors in travel-related Google search queries. A year later, the Commission imposed its first fines on Google for its alleged self-preferencing. Reports from October 2025 suggested that Google had proposed changing the way its search results were displayed in order to comply with the block’s rules.
Which brings us to today’s news. According to ReutersGoogle’s revised search results “will highlight one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with less detail.” A carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants, for example, will sit below with key features like real-time prices removed. » These specialized engines include sites like Expedia or Hotels.com, also known as vertical search services, so European users may soon see these aggregators and comparison sites given higher priority than individual company websites in their results. Reuters noted that “rankings will be determined by Google’s algorithm,” meaning the tech company still holds a lot of control over how results are displayed. The EC had given Google 60 days to comply with its rules, but the company did not specify an exact time frame for when European users will start seeing the changes.
Google executives defined DMA compliance as requiring it to provide lower-quality search results. The company said Reuters that the changes will result in the greatest decrease in quality of service in the history of the search engine. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans, empowering online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses and removing useful features that people rely on every day,” Nick Fox, senior vice president of knowledge and insights at Google, said in a statement to the publication. Reuters added that, according to Google, its previous search changes for DMA compliance were linked to a 30 percent decrease “in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses”, and the company suggested there would be another drop with the new updates.
