Google told Reuters its newly rolled out Digital Markets Act (DMA) changes in Europe mark “the largest reduction in quality of service at the world’s most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history.” The redesign restructures how hotels, airlines, and restaurants appear in Search, pushing comparison sites above individual business listings. Google is the one making this claim about its own product.
The mechanics matter here. A single vertical search service, such as Expedia or Booking.com, now sits at the top of results. Two more comparison providers follow with reduced detail. Individual hotel, airline, and restaurant listings, previously served through the Hotel Local Pack, drop into a carousel below, stripped of features like real-time pricing. Google’s algorithm determines the ranking order within that new structure.
Google is not speculating about the impact. It is citing its own 2024 testing of this exact format, conducted before the European Commission required the rollout. That testing found users were measurably less satisfied, took longer to find hotels, ran more searches, and abandoned their search sessions more often. Hotels lost more than 10 percent of their traffic, a loss Google says affected hundreds of thousands of European properties. Traffic to intermediary sites stayed flat.
That is the data-source contrast worth naming directly: the evidence behind Google’s “largest reduction in quality” claim is Google’s own internal study, not an independent audit. The European Commission reviewed that same 2024 data and required the change anyway, which means the regulator and the platform disagree on what the numbers justify, not on what the numbers say.
There is also an inconsistency in how Google defines quality here that the company does not address. Its 2024 methodology measured degraded search quality partly by traffic loss to hotel websites and partly by users needing more searches to find what they wanted. Both of those same outcomes, reduced direct-site traffic and an increase in query volume per session, are also documented effects of AI Overviews and AI Mode, features Google has not described as a quality reduction. Search Engine Roundtable, which first reported the Reuters comments alongside screenshots of the new module layout, noted this discrepancy directly.
Google has published a separate document detailing how the search results vary by European region, but it has not released updated figures showing the real-world impact of this specific rollout, only the 2024 pre-launch test. Whether actual hotel traffic losses in production match or exceed the projected 10 percent has not been disclosed.
For hotels and travel businesses depending on direct search visibility in the EU, the shift is structural rather than temporary: the Hotel Local Pack is gone, replaced by a multi-provider module that favors Expedia, Booking.com, and similar aggregators by default. Search teams managing European hotel, airline, or restaurant listings should audit how much of their organic visibility already runs through that carousel and treat OTA and metasearch placement as a near-term distribution requirement rather than a supplementary channel.
Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported this on September 8, 2026, citing comments Google gave to Reuters.
