Google has started labeling prices inside its EU booking search widgets as personalized, rather than letting users assume a flat rate. The widgets, built to satisfy the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU law that forces Google to open up search real estate to rival services, now carry a line reading: “This price was customised by the booking partner based on factors such as your device type.”
The stakes are immediate for travel and hospitality sites competing inside those widgets. If price is already variable by signal before a partner’s own margin logic kicks in, the widget stops being a neutral price-comparison surface and becomes another layer where the underlying ranking and pricing inputs are opaque to the merchants supplying the data.
Radu Oncescu spotted the disclaimer and posted a screenshot on X, according to Search Engine Roundtable, which first reported the change. The wording names only one variable, device type, and leaves the rest unstated.
Search Engine Roundtable’s own writeup speculates that location and language likely factor in as well, but that is inference, not confirmation from Google. The company has not published documentation describing what inputs feed the customization or what data it forwards to booking partners to enable it. That gap matters more than the disclaimer itself: a partner cannot audit a pricing signal it does not know exists, and neither can the traveler seeing the number.
This is a narrower disclosure than Google’s usual practice. When Google labels a result as personalized in classic search, it typically points to a general basket of signals, search history, location, prior interactions. Here, the language is deliberately specific to “device type,” which reads less like a full personalization notice and more like the minimum disclosure needed to satisfy DMA transparency requirements without revealing the full mechanism.
The disclaimer’s EU-only scope is itself informative. DMA enforcement applies specifically to Google’s “core platform services,” and booking search widgets fall under that umbrella when they compete with rival comparison-shopping and travel services the law was written to protect. A US or UK user browsing the same query would not see this notice, because the legal obligation triggering it does not apply there. That regional split means any analysis of pricing behavior in these widgets has to be geography-specific from the start.
For search teams working travel, hospitality, or any vertical with a booking-partner integration, the open question is what data Google actually transmits to price-setting partners, and whether that data set will expand as EU regulators press for more transparency. Search Engine Roundtable’s report does not include any independent measurement of how much prices actually shift by device, only the fact that the widget now says they do.
Sites that supply pricing into Google’s booking widgets should treat this disclosure as a signal to request clarity from their own Google partner contacts about what inputs are being passed through, since device-level price variance can silently distort conversion tracking and rate-parity commitments made to other channels. Teams monitoring EU SERP behavior should also screenshot and log widget pricing across device types now, before any further disclosure changes make retroactive comparison impossible.
Search Engine Roundtable, in a report by Barry Schwartz published September 7, 2026, first documented the new disclaimer in Google’s DMA booking widgets.
