Google’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA, EU regulation that forces large tech “gatekeepers” to open their platforms to competitors) has reshuffled search results for hotels, flights, and travel across Europe. In a statement quoted by Reuters, Google called the rollout “the largest reduction in quality of service at the world’s most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history.” That is not a neutral assessment from an outside observer. That is Google’s own language, describing its own product.
What Did Google Actually Change in European Search Results?
The EU DMA changes target what Google calls Vertical Search Services (VSS), specialized search engines focused on one category, such as travel booking or price comparison. Platforms like Expedia, Booking.com, and Priceline now receive more prominent placement in European search results for hotel, flight, and restaurant queries. Per Search Engine Roundtable (September 2026), these changes are specific to VSS and are separate from the site reputation abuse policy changes Google made in Europe the prior week.
- The traditional Hotel Local Pack, the map-based module showing nearby hotels with direct links and pricing, disappears. It is replaced by a multi-provider module featuring Booking.com, Expedia, Priceline, and other travel platforms alongside Google’s own listings, according to SEO analyst Lluc B. Penycate (September 8, 2026).
- The previous Places Sites module is replaced by a dedicated Hotel Sites module, which surfaces individual hotels with prices and links to their official websites. Hotels have not vanished from results, but the competitive environment has shifted.
- The new layout highlights one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. Below them sits a carousel of hotels, airlines, and restaurants with key features such as real-time prices stripped out.
- Rankings within this structure are still determined by Google’s algorithm.
Google has also published updated documentation on its developer portal (developers.google.com) covering the aggregator and direct supplier features now available in European search results for hotels, flights, ground transportation, and products.
Why Is Google Calling This Its Biggest Quality Drop Ever?
Google’s position, as reported by Reuters, is that the DMA forces it to give premium search visibility to price comparison intermediaries over the businesses those intermediaries represent. The revamped results favor platforms like Expedia and Booking.com, which aggregate listings, over individual hotels that would otherwise appear with a direct link, phone number, and address. In Google’s view, this adds friction between a user’s query and a useful answer.
The statement is striking precisely because it is self-implicating. Google is publicly saying its own search product is now worse in Europe than it has ever been, and the cause is regulatory compliance rather than an engineering failure.
What Did Google’s Own 2024 Test Reveal?
Google tested a version of these DMA-compliant results in 2024 and submitted the findings to the European Commission. The Commission proceeded regardless. According to Google’s published results from that test:
- People were measurably less satisfied with search results and took longer to find hotels, including needing to run more searches.
- More users gave up entirely and did not find what they were looking for.
- Overall traffic to hotels and intermediary sites went down.
- Hotels lost the most traffic, more than 10%, affecting hundreds of thousands of European hotels.
- Traffic to intermediary sites largely stayed flat, meaning the lost traffic dissipated rather than shifting to OTAs (Online Travel Agencies, booking platforms like Booking.com or Expedia).
That last point is worth noting. The traffic loss was not redistributed to the comparison platforms the DMA was designed to benefit. It largely disappeared.
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
Here is the plain version: a hotel that previously appeared directly in search results now has to compete in a module dominated by Booking.com and Expedia before a user even reaches a direct link. The intermediary layer now sits between users and businesses by structural design, not by algorithm alone.
Picture someone in Germany searching for “hotels in Amsterdam.” Before these changes, the map-based local pack might show Hotel X with a direct price and booking link. Now, the top of that page shows Booking.com, Expedia, and Priceline. Hotel X appears further down in a separate module. The first thing the user sees is an aggregator, not the hotel itself.
This is not only a hotel problem. The DMA framework applies to flights, ground transportation, and products. Any brand operating in these verticals across EU markets now faces a search landscape where a comparison platform occupies the premium real-time visibility slot by regulatory requirement.
One angle the sources do not address directly, but is worth flagging: AI retrieval systems (the engines behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s own AI Mode, and similar tools) crawl and index what is prominent in search results. If the highest-visibility pages in European travel SERPs are now aggregator pages rather than direct supplier pages, those aggregator pages are also what AI systems will more often encounter, reference, and potentially surface in AI-generated answers. The structural shift at the SERP level is also a structural shift in what becomes the “authoritative” layer for AI retrieval, and that is unlikely to be the direct hotel website.
Hingewise’s view: the DMA outcome is a live demonstration that search visibility is increasingly governed by structural rules, regulatory, algorithmic, and architectural, not just content quality or technical SEO. A brand can have a perfectly optimised page and still lose its SERP position because the slot it was optimizing for no longer exists in the same form. For brands in affected verticals, this is the moment to audit not just how you rank, but which features and modules you can realistically appear in under the new layout.
What Should Brands in Affected Verticals Check Before Drawing Conclusions?
- Confirm whether your business category (hotels, flights, restaurants, ground transport, products) is covered by the DMA vertical search changes in your specific EU market.
- Pull European organic traffic data from September 2026 onward and compare by channel, direct organic, OTA-referred, and Google-referred sessions, to isolate actual impact.
- Audit which SERP features you previously appeared in (Local Pack, Places Sites module) and verify whether those features still exist for your query types in EU search results.
- Review Google’s updated aggregator features documentation at developers.google.com to understand eligibility criteria for direct suppliers versus aggregators in the new modules.
- Assess your distribution presence on the VSS platforms now holding the top slots; if direct organic visibility is structurally reduced, your aggregator presence becomes a more significant traffic lever.
- Monitor branded search queries separately, users who already know your hotel or brand may still find you directly; the loss is most acute for unbranded discovery queries.
The DMA changes are live as of September 2026 and the European Commission’s position is settled. What remains open is the actual traffic data beyond Google’s 2024 test. Whether European users adapt their search behavior, whether OTAs ultimately gain the traffic hotels lose, and whether Google finds compliant ways to improve the experience within the new rules, those are the questions the next reporting cycle will begin to answer.
Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance from the sources cited above and checked against them before publishing. The "What this means for AI-search visibility" section is Hingewise's editorial analysis, built on the frameworks and positions we use in our GEO work. How we work: Editorial policy.