Google has announced that it will change its search services in the EU in an attempt to avoid part of the €890 million in fines imposed on the company by the European Commission earlier this summer.
The EU fined Google €460 million, arguing that the company had abused its dominant position in search by favoring its own branded services when displaying search results.
The penalty was the latest in a series of clashes between the EU and the US technology giant over alleged violations of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The dispute largely centers on the DMA requirement that major technology companies must not give their own services preferential treatment in rankings compared with third-party services.
Google first introduced some of its planned service changes in March 2024 in response to the Digital Markets Act. However, later that month, the European Commission announced that it was investigating Google, along with Apple and Meta, over the continued preferential treatment of their own services.
The investigation focused on practices such as displaying Google Flights information above competing services for travel-related queries in Google Search. A year later, the Commission imposed its first penalties on Google over the alleged favoritism of its own services. Reports from October 2025 suggested that Google had offered to change the way search results were displayed in order to comply with EU rules.
According to Reuters, Google’s redesigned search results will highlight one specialized search service at the top of the page, followed by two additional services shown with fewer details. Below them will be a carousel featuring hotels, airlines, and restaurants, although key features such as real-time pricing will be removed.
These specialized search services include websites such as Expedia and Hotels.com, also known as vertical search services. As a result, European users may soon see aggregators and price-comparison websites receive greater prominence in search results than the websites of individual companies.
Reuters reported that “ranking will be determined by Google’s algorithm,” meaning the technology company will still retain significant influence over how results are presented.
The European Commission has given Google 60 days to comply with the rules, although the company has not specified when European users will begin noticing the changes.
Google executives have portrayed compliance with the DMA as something that is forcing the company to deliver lower-quality search results. Google told Reuters that the changes would represent the largest reduction in service quality in the history of its search engine.
“These changes worsen the user experience for Europeans, favor online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and remove useful features that people rely on every day,” Nick Fox, Google’s Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Information, said in a statement to the news agency.
Reuters also reported that, according to Google, previous search changes introduced to comply with the DMA were associated with a 30% decline in “free, direct booking traffic to European businesses.” The company suggested that the latest changes could result in another decline.
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