Google will 'degrade' Search in Europe to avoid EU fines

The company was accused of favoring its own content in search engine results.

Google said it will change its Search services in the EU in an effort to sidestep some of the €890 million (~$1 billion) in fines levied by the European Commission earlier this summer. The EU charged a fine of €460 million (~$534 million) on claims that Google had abused its dominance in search to prioritize the brand's other services when displaying query results.

That sanction was the latest salvo between the EU government and a US tech company for infringing on its Digital Markets Act. The debate centers on the DMA requirement that major tech brands "must not treat their own services more favorably in ranking than third-party services."

Google first laid out some of its planned changes to its services in response to the Digital Markets Act in March 2024. Later that month, though, the EC said it was investigating the company, as well as Apple and Meta, for continuing to favor their own services with practices such as putting Google Flights information above competitors in travel-related Google Search queries. A year later, the Commission charged its first fines to Google for the alleged self-preferencing. Reports in October 2025 suggested that Google had offered to make changes to how its search results were displayed in order to meet the bloc's rules.

Which brings us to today's news. According to Reuters , Google's revised search results "will ​highlight one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. A carousel of hotels, airlines ​and restaurants, for example, will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out." Those specialized engines include sites like Expedia or Hotels.com, also known as vertical search services, so European users may soon see those aggregators and comparison sites prioritized more highly than individual businesses' websites in their results. Reuters noted that "the rankings will be determined by Google's algorithm," meaning the tech company still holds a lot of control over how results are displayed. The EC had given Google 60 days to comply with its rules, but the company has not specified an exact timeline for when European users will start seeing the changes.

Google leadership has framed DMA compliance as forcing it to deliver lower quality search results. The company told Reuters that the changes will amount to the largest decrease in service quality in the search engine's history. "These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans — boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day," Nick Fox, senior vice-president of knowledge and information at Google, said in a statement to the publication. Reuters added that according to Google, its past search changes for DMA compliance were tied to a 30 percent decrease "in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses," and the company suggested there would be another drop with the new updates.