The European Commission is preparing to find that Google broke EU law by ranking its own shopping, travel, and hotel services above competing options in Search, the Financial Times reported, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter and internal Commission documents. Search Engine Land, citing that FT report, said a decision under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s platform competition law, could land within days. For search teams running vertical or comparison sites in Europe, this is a ranking-and-visibility story before it is a legal one.
Google’s shopping, travel, and hotel panels occupy some of the highest-intent commercial search real estate in the market. An order requiring changes to how those panels are built and populated could open placement to comparison sites, travel platforms, and shopping services that have competed against Google’s own units for years. Which queries are affected, and how quickly Google must comply, will matter more to operators than the size of any penalty.
On the penalty itself, the Commission is expected to fine Google hundreds of millions of euros across two separate DMA decisions, according to the FT report relayed by Search Engine Land. Google could also face daily penalties if it misses a 60 day compliance window on parts of the order. None of this has been formally announced. Google has not confirmed the figures, and the ruling itself remains a forecast built on sourcing, not a filed decision.
The more consequential piece for search practitioners sits inside a second question the Commission is weighing: whether Google must give rival search engines access to its own ranking, query, click, and view data. A parallel question covers whether third-party AI providers get the same underlying access Google already gives Gemini. Google has argued that sharing this data would threaten user privacy and exceed the Commission’s authority, a position it has raised previously in EU proceedings.
Brussels has ordered remedies against Google’s self-preferencing in shopping results before, and that history is not encouraging for anyone expecting a fast fix. Earlier shopping-related enforcement changed how Google displayed certain ad units without restoring the visibility many comparison sites had lost before the original ruling. A data-sharing mandate would be structurally different from an ad-display tweak, but the pattern of slow, contested remediation is the same one the industry has already lived through once.
Neither Search Engine Land nor the FT report has detailed what a ranking or click-data-sharing order would actually require in practice: whether it covers organic results, the vertical panels themselves, or both, and whether the obligation extends beyond EU-based queries. That distinction decides whether rival engines get genuinely useful competitive inputs or a narrow, symbolic data feed. It also decides whether Google’s SERP layout in shopping, travel, and hotel categories visibly changes for EU users or stays the same while the underlying data pipes shift.
Google has appealed prior EU antitrust findings rather than comply immediately, so any order here should be treated as provisional until an appeal timeline is public. Teams managing shopping, travel, or hotel visibility for EU markets should map which of their queries currently show Google’s own vertical panels now, so they have a clean before-and-after baseline the moment a compliance deadline, not just a headline, actually arrives.
Search Engine Land, in a July 15, 2026 report by Danny Goodwin, first covered the story, citing Financial Times reporting on the pending European Commission decision.
