Google has removed product carousels from shopping-related search results across the European Economic Area, affecting how merchants reach customers online. The search engine made the change last week to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a regulation designed to regulate large digital platforms. According to Google, this represents the biggest drop in search result quality in its 29-year history.
Visibility drops sharply in the EEA
Several industry observers report the rollout is already underway. Productrise, an organic shopping analytics platform based in the Netherlands, noted that familiar product blocks have almost completely vanished from search results in EEA countries. Founder Hugo Huijer told Ecommerce News Europe that the platform tracks thousands of queries daily and sees declines of 90 to 100 percent within a few days.
Data from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden shows the extent of this loss. Huijer says the impact is significant, noting that online retailers have lost a major part of the organic visibility they previously relied on. He calls it a fundamental shift in how visibility works for anyone selling products online, describing it as a feature many companies built their strategies around that is now gone.
For online shoppers, the new layout requires more clicks. Instead of seeing product grids or carousels, users now encounter a list of shops and aggregators. SEO Südwest analyst Kristian Kunz pointed out that shopping has also disappeared from the tab navigation in Google’s search engine, meaning it cannot be found under “More.” Only Google Shopping Ads remain visible in these sections. Kunz argues that being listed in Google Merchant Center is now less valuable because products hardly display anymore, making SEO for products less relevant for measures directly related to the platform.
The change comes as organic visibility faces broader pressure. Recent research in Germany indicates the share of organic traffic in total website traffic has declined, a trend linked to the rise of AI Overviews in Google. This shift likely benefits larger retailers with more direct traffic channels, while smaller merchants may struggle more to gain visibility through online marketing. Productrise expects category pages to become more important again within organic search as a result of this development.
