The prediction has become the measurement. Two weeks after Google told Reuters its Digital Markets Act (DMA) overhaul was the largest quality reduction in its search history, independent tracking shows free product listings and “popular products” carousels have nearly disappeared from Google Search across the European Economic Area (EEA).
Hugo Huijer of Productrise plotted the change and reported drops of roughly 90 to 100 percent in countries where he had sufficient data: Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the carousel data Friday and cross-checked it against Semrush’s own SERP-feature tracking, which showed the same pattern across EEA markets.
Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, confirmed in a LinkedIn comment that the removal is a direct result of the DMA ruling, not a routine layout test. That confirmation closes the gap between the earlier reporting, where Google described the coming changes only in general terms, and what searchers in Europe are now seeing in production.
The mechanism is straightforward. Organic product blocks, the free listings that let a retailer’s own page appear directly in a shopping-intent search, are being replaced by placements for comparison shopping services (CSS), also called vertical shopping services (VSS). A screenshot from Adriaan Dekker, shared on LinkedIn via Gabriel Baumgarten, shows the space where free listings once sat now filled entirely by CSS providers rather than individual merchant results.
That is a structurally different outcome than the hotel and travel carousel change covered in Google’s Reuters comments. There, Google’s own 2024 testing quantified a specific cost: hotels lost more than 10 percent of traffic, a figure Google chose to disclose. For the product carousel removal, no comparable before-and-after retailer-traffic number has been published by Google, only the third-party SERP-feature tracking from Productrise and Semrush showing the carousels themselves are gone. The absence of Google’s own retailer-impact figure here, after it volunteered one for hotels, is itself worth noting.
Both changes share the same regulatory root and the same competitive winner. In travel, aggregators like Expedia and Booking.com now sit above individual business listings. In shopping, CSS and VSS providers now occupy the space organic product results used to fill. Google’s algorithm still ranks results within each new structure, but the free-listing entry point that let a merchant’s own domain surface directly has been narrowed to a much smaller set of intermediary categories.
For any retailer selling into Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, or the Netherlands, this is not a ranking fluctuation to wait out. The free organic product listing, a channel that required no ad spend and no CSS partnership fee, is effectively gone from Google Search in those markets. Merchandising and paid-search teams should treat a CSS or Google Shopping ad presence in the EEA as a near-mandatory distribution cost for the remainder of the year, and should pull Search Console and Semrush data now to confirm how much commercial-query visibility their own domains have already lost.
Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported this development, citing data from Productrise’s Hugo Huijer and a LinkedIn confirmation from Google’s Ginny Marvin.
