Google says the changes are the biggest quality drop in Search's 29-year history. The Commission's own decision accepts that the affected features helped users. Under Brussels' reading of the DMA, that is not a defence.
Google has rolled out changes to its search results across the European Economic Area on the orders of the European Commission, and it is not pretending the redesign is an improvement. In briefings tied to the launch on 8 September, the company said the changes mark the largest reduction in search quality in the product's 29-year history, an unusually blunt admission from a business that has spent two decades defending the integrity of its ranking algorithm.
The order followed the first fines the Commission has imposed on Google under the Digital Markets Act. On 23 July it fined Google €460 million for giving its own shopping, hotels, transport and sports results more prominent treatment in search than rival services, and €430 million over anti-steering rules on Google Play: €890 million in total. Google was given 60 days to bring the practices to an end; that deadline falls later this month. If the Commission decides the redesign falls short and opens a further proceeding, the DMA allows periodic penalty payments of up to 5 per cent of Google's average daily worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year, for each day the breach continues.
Google says it has done what it was ordered to do, and that doing so has made the product worse. The new results page, as reported by Reuters, highlights one specialised search service at the top, follows it with two others in less detail, and drops a carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants below with real-time prices stripped out. Google has published the design as new aggregator units and supplier units for hotel, flight, train and product queries in the EEA. Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president for knowledge and information, said in a statement to Reuters that the changes "degrade the user experience for Europeans", boosting "online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses".
The notable thing is that the Commission's own decision does not really contest any of this. On product searches, recital 188 says the Commission "does not contest that the unit helps users find products corresponding to their query". On translation, in recitals 535 and 542, the Commission accepted that the unit provided relevant answers, then held that its purpose still went beyond an ordinary search engine. On sports, in recitals 565 to 573, it accepted that the pane was useful, then classed it as a separate service because the data is licensed rather than crawled from the open web, and therefore could not sit above rival sports sites. On flights the reasoning is the same, set out at recital 291.
Recital 189 states the position plainly: "It is not decisive for the application of Article 6(5) ... whether Alphabet's own service is beneficial to one user group or another. The legislator deliberately opted against allowing for this sort of efficiency defence." The same reasoning, in near identical wording, appears again at recital 291.
So the pattern runs through the whole decision. Several of the affected features were useful or relevant to users, and the Commission says so. It then says those benefits are not decisive under Article 6(5). The DMA works differently from traditional competition enforcement: it imposes obligations on designated gatekeepers in advance, and under the self-preferencing ban in Article 6(5) a firm cannot run what competition lawyers call an efficiency defence. Brussels' own case is that a gatekeeper should not be able to rank its own services above rivals, and that the Act exists to make digital markets fairer and more contestable. Its competition chief, Teresa Ribera, put the point sharply when the fines were announced: "the best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine."
The winners and the losers
The most immediate beneficiaries of the redesign are the comparison services that the DMA's self-preferencing rules are intended to give a fairer opportunity to compete. Booking.com and Expedia gain the prominent slots. Local hotels and restaurants, which used to appear with a link, a phone number and an address, sit further down the page. Google says the customers who once reached such businesses directly will now pass through an intermediary instead, and it points to an earlier round of DMA changes under which some airlines, hotel operators and small retailers reported free direct-booking clicks down by as much as 30 per cent.
It is worth bearing in mind that Google is not a disinterested witness. Ranking its own boxes first sends traffic and data through Alphabet's products, and the company has every reason to describe the new layout as a collapse in quality. The tests it cites all come from Google itself. None of that means the quality concern is invented; it means the numbers are Google's numbers.
Dirk Auer, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, told Brussels Signal that "of course Google has a dog in the race", but that "doesn't make its claim any less true. Europeans searching for maps, hotels or flights are now getting a significantly worse product, and everyone involved knows it." In Auer's analysis, the outcome is "the direct and intended result of how the Commission has chosen to interpret the DMA": a rule the legislature meant as narrow and clearly defined has been stretched to cover tabs, a "directions" button on a map, a translation box and even the Solitaire doodle, with an order closing on "any other button" pointing to a Google service. "When Google showed that removing map links had degraded the service for users, the Commission replied that quality was 'not relevant'. If quality is irrelevant and the rule catches everything on the Google Search page, then degradation is no longer an unintended side effect of enforcement." He said the DMA was supposed to protect European consumers and small businesses. "Instead it is making information harder to find and pulling traffic from hotel and airline websites towards a handful of aggregators. It harms those very people it intended to protect."
Kay Jebelli, vice president for Europe at the tech industry group Chamber of Progress, told Brussels Signal: "Something is wrong with this process. Good digital policy can't mean making things worse for European users." On X he argued that European regulators are using the Digital Markets Act "to make Google Search worse for all European users, so they can prop up European rivals and protect them from competition from Google". That is Jebelli's political reading of the Commission's motives, and it should be taken as such.
Malte Landwehr, an SEO specialist documenting the rollout, posted screenshots of the new supplier units, product sliders and a hotel map that no longer opens Google Maps when clicked. As he has pointed out, EU users already lost the dedicated Maps tab in ordinary search under earlier DMA compliance, a consequence the industry group Chamber of Progress has documented.
Where the changes apply matters. The redesign has been rolled out in the European Economic Area: the 27 member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Google's own documentation lists the new units as available to EEA users, and Nick Fox said users outside the EU will not be impacted by the changes. The measures ordered by this DMA case therefore do not reach Britain, which left both the EU and the EEA, and its users keep the existing results for these queries. That is not to say the UK has no comparable process of its own: the Competition and Markets Authority has designated Google's search services under the UK's own new digital markets regime and this year proposed conduct requirements to change how Google delivers search in Britain.
Steve Wright, Campaign Lead for Brexit at the Great British PAC, said the episode also showed the regulatory divergence opening up between Britain and the European Union.
"As the British voter is now acutely aware, the UK Government has been slow to take advantage of the benefits that come from EU departure. Thankfully the EU continues to implement new laws and court rulings, that allow the UK to still benefit just by standing still. The EU is now forcing consumers to be delivered with a worse experience and a worse product - and the Brits have Brexit to thank for avoiding such idiocy"
What comes next
The timing helps explain the noise. The Commission delivered its first statutory review of the DMA this spring, as required by the Act by 3 May 2026, and concluded that the rules are working and that it is too early for legislative change. The "biggest quality drop in 29 years" is therefore not only an engineering assessment but a powerful argument for Google to put before Brussels as the regulatory debate moves on. Google is not alone in wrestling with the law: Apple and Meta, fined €500 million and €200 million respectively in April last year for their own breaches of the DMA, are contesting the decisions, and Apple continues to adjust its EU terms. Google's case is becoming one of the clearest tests of how far the Commission's DMA enforcement can reshape a major consumer product.
A law meant to make digital markets fairer has, in its first major Google Search enforcement, produced changes that Google says leave users with a worse product and some businesses with less direct traffic. The Commission's own decision acknowledges that some of the features caught by its interpretation of the DMA were useful to users. Google calls the resulting loss of quality a problem. Brussels calls compliance with the rule the law.