Free product listings gone in the EEA: replan Shopping

Since mid-September 2026, free product listings and product carousels have largely disappeared from Google Search in the European Economic Area (EEA) (Search Engine Roundtable). For many online shops, this was a channel that brought in visitors without any click costs: a well-maintained product feed in Google Merchant Center was enough to appear in Search with an image, a price and the shop name. It is being replaced by new elements that Google describes in its documentation as of September 18, 2026, including one unit for comparison shopping services and one for direct suppliers (Google Search Central). This article sorts out what is documented and what is not, explains the new results page and shows how shops can replan their channels across Shopping ads, price comparison and organic visibility. The technical foundation remains the product feed and the Merchant Center integration.

What disappeared in the EEA in mid-September

On September 18, 2026, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google Search had dropped free product listings and carousel formats in the European Economic Area (Search Engine Roundtable). This refers to the product blocks that appeared for purchase-related queries without an ad label, such as the "Popular products" carousel with image, price and retailer name. An analysis quoted there describes how these carousels almost entirely disappeared from Search in the EEA within two days (Search Engine Roundtable). This article therefore refers to mid-September 2026.

For Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, the same analysis reports drops of roughly 90 to 100% in these product carousels (Search Engine Roundtable). These are not figures from Google but a third-party analysis that its author published as a chart. Search Engine Roundtable reproduces them and, by its own account, compared them with a second data series that shows the same picture. For the remaining EEA countries, the analysis did not have enough data.

Background: the Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, applies to so-called gatekeepers, meaning large platforms that hold a key position between businesses and customers. The European Commission designated Google as a gatekeeper for its search engine Google Search in September 2023 (European Commission). For ranking, the regulation contains a rule that is at the core of the current changes (Article 6(5) DMA):

The gatekeeper shall not treat more favourably, in ranking and related indexing and crawling, services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself than similar services or products of a third party.

Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (Digital Markets Act), Article 6(5)

On July 23, 2026, the Commission found that Google does not meet this obligation in Search: its own services, including shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, are given preferential treatment over those of third parties (European Commission). The Commission sets a period of 60 days for complying with the decision (European Commission). Google may appeal the decision (European Commission). At the same time, the announcement notes that Google had already proposed and started testing changes to how it presents its own free services such as shopping, hotels and flights (European Commission). The observed removal of free product listings falls within this time frame.

The new results page: two units instead of a carousel

Google describes two new elements for users in the EEA (Google Search Central). The aggregator unit is meant for vertical search services, including comparison shopping services (CSS), online travel agencies, metasearch engines and directories. It appears for queries about hotels, flights, long-distance trains, products and local businesses. The results of the top-ranked provider are expanded by default, users can pick a different service from a list, and only one aggregator unit is shown at a time (Google Search Central). A click in the unit leads directly to the website of that service, not to the shop.

Next to it is the supplier unit for direct providers, such as individual hotels, airlines, brick-and-mortar stores or trades businesses. For product queries, this means retailers who sell their goods themselves. One restriction is crucial, and Google states it explicitly: the supplier unit only appears if the aggregator unit appears (Google Search Central). Anyone who serves users in the EEA and qualifies as a direct provider for the queries mentioned can take part. There is no sign-up, and Google does not require any additional data beyond what is accessible through crawling the website; feeds can, however, enhance the entries (Google Search Central).

The third element in the table is less directly usable for shops: carousels built from structured data show several entries from one website side by side. Google offers them as a beta in the EEA for product queries, among others, but for products in CSS program countries it points to that very program (Google Search Central).

What the change means for your shop

How much depends on this channel becomes clear from how widespread online shopping is: in the EU, 78% of people aged 16 to 74 who had used the internet in the previous twelve months bought or ordered goods or services online in 2025 (Eurostat). Some of these purchases start with a product search, and that is exactly where the free listings used to appear. How large that share was varies greatly from shop to shop. A retailer with a well-known brand and many direct visitors will notice the change less than a niche shop whose new customers mostly came through product searches.

Four groups are usually hit hardest:

• Shops without an ad budget that have so far used Google Shopping only through free listings.
• Product ranges with many comparable items where customers choose by image and price, such as spare parts, accessories or branded goods.
• Young shops whose domain still carries little weight in web results and that became visible faster through product data than through content.
• Retailers who did not tag their product URLs in the feed and therefore can hardly attribute the decline in their web analytics.

The data foundation stays the same. The product feed in Merchant Center continues to power Shopping ads and the work with comparison shopping services. Merchant Center Help also describes that retailers in Europe can select exactly one comparison shopping service through which their products are submitted for free listings (Merchant Center Help). Where such listings still appear after the change cannot be determined from the sources cited here. Anyone who stops maintaining the feed now therefore loses the foundation for the remaining channels.

Channel matrix: ads, price comparison, organic

After the change, there are three ways left to show products for a search query in the EEA. None of them replaces free listings one to one; they differ in cost, control and data source:

For Shopping ads, the sources cited here do not document any change to the basic model. In 21 countries, including Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, Shopping ads and free product listings are placed through a comparison shopping service anyway; one of them is Google Shopping itself (Merchant Center Help). Google invoices the comparison shopping service for the clicks, and the amount depends on the ad auction (Merchant Center Help). However, the Commission notes that Google has also proposed and started testing changes to how it presents Shopping ads (European Commission). Anyone shifting budget from free listings to ads should therefore expect changes in the ad space and review their plans at short intervals.

Staying visible organically: the supplier unit

For the supplier unit, Google does not require any data beyond what crawling provides (Google Search Central). That sounds convenient, but it shifts the work to the product pages themselves: what the crawler cannot find on the page cannot appear in the unit. For merchants optimizing for all types of shopping results, Google recommends putting Product structured data in the initial HTML (Google Search Central). According to Google, markup generated with JavaScript can make Shopping crawls less frequent and less reliable, which matters especially for price and availability (Google Search Central).

For your own product pages, this results in a short checklist:

• Product pages can be reached by the crawler: no block in robots.txt, no noindex, no login requirement.
• Price, currency and availability are in the delivered HTML and match the feed.
• Product structured data with Offer is included on the server side, not added by script after loading.
• Shipping and return conditions are stated on the page and in the data.
• The page serves users in the EEA: delivery countries, language and prices fit the target audience.
• Variants such as size and color have distinct URLs that the crawler can reach.

The following snippet shows an example of lean markup. It belongs in the source code of the product page that the server delivers; brand, number and URL are example values.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Tara hiking boot, women",
  "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Example Brand" },
  "gtin13": "9520123456788",
  "image": "https://shop.example/images/tara-hiking-boot.jpg",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://shop.example/tara-hiking-boot",
    "price": "129.90",
    "priceCurrency": "EUR",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  }
}
</script>

We have described in more detail how product data and structured data work together in our article on product data and structured data. For shops built on Shopware, we usually implement the markup in the theme so that it stays up to date with every product; more on this from our Shopware agency. The role that well-marked-up product pages also play for AI answers in Search is covered in the article on AI Overviews in shopping.

Assessing comparison shopping services without committing

Comparison shopping services appear in the aggregator unit with their own results, and a click leads to their website (Google Search Central). A shop is only visible there if it is listed with the service that ranks at the top for that query or that the user picks. Google requires data from these services via feed or API and recommends, among other things, accurate titles, high-quality imagery and up-to-date prices and availability that match the landing page (Google Search Central). For retailers, this means that the same data quality that used to carry free listings now determines how an offer looks in price comparison.

For Shopping ads, Merchant Center Help describes that comparison shopping services charge differently: some per click, others through a commission when a click on an ad leads to a sale (Merchant Center Help). The sources do not state terms for a listing in the aggregator unit. We do not recommend any particular service. A comparison along fixed questions makes sense:

1. Billing: Cost per click, commission or a mix, and from which event does it count?
2. Data: Which feed format does the service require, how often is it updated, and who fixes errors?
3. Data sharing: What does the service use the product data for beyond the listing?
4. Term: How quickly can the cooperation be ended or moved to another service?
5. Reporting: Which metrics does the service provide, and can they be matched with your own web analytics?

Reweighting Shopping ads

Anyone who used to receive a significant share of product visits through free listings now faces a budget question: which of these visits should be bought through ads in the future, and at what price? The answer depends on the margin per product. Products with a high margin and good sell-through can carry a cost per click more easily than products that only sell on the lowest price. A flat increase on the previous budget is therefore rarely sensible.

Late October is a good time for this, because demand rises in many categories ahead of Black Week, and with it, as a rule, the competition for ad placements. How the daily budget in Google Ads is distributed across Search and other channels is explained in our article on channel prioritization in Google Ads. For campaigns that combine feed and assets, the article on Performance Max for online shops is worth a look. And anyone running sale prices for the promotional week should set the time windows in the feed carefully, as described in the article on sale prices in Merchant Center.

Measuring the impact on your own shop

You can only see the effect on your own shop by comparing two periods. Mid-September 2026 works as the dividing line. Compare periods of equal length before and after, ideally together with the same period of the previous year to account for seasonal fluctuations. Four sources help with this:

• Merchant Center: Performance reports before and after the change, separated into paid and unpaid clicks, as far as the account shows them.
• Search Console: Clicks and impressions of product pages in web search; Google names Search Console as the tool for keeping up with what is happening across Search (Google Search Central).
• Web analytics: Sessions and orders with the campaign parameters that were set in the feed for free listings.
• Revenue by category: Which product groups lost clearly, and which hardly at all?

A clean separation of ads and organic traffic is essential. If your conversion measurement runs on the server side, you can attribute channels more reliably; our article on server-side tracking for Google Ads covers the basics. For assessing the web results themselves, a regular SEO analysis of product and category pages helps.

Roadmap for the coming weeks

The transition can be organized in six steps. The order follows the idea of knowing your own situation first and only then moving money or contracts.

1. Measure the baseline: Determine the share of free listings in clicks, orders and revenue up to mid-September 2026.
2. Check product pages: Review crawlability, prices in the HTML and structured data in the most important categories.
3. Clean up the feed: Maintain titles, images, prices and availability so that they work equally well for ads and comparison shopping services.
4. Assess price comparison: Compare two or three services using the questions above and plan a test with a limited range of products.
5. Distribute the ad budget: Select products with a viable margin for Shopping ads, in good time before Black Week.
6. Keep watching: Look at the results page for your own categories regularly, because in July 2026 the Commission announced that it would assess the tested changes and continue its dialogue with Google (European Commission).

The basics of feed maintenance, from titles and images to GTIN and brand, are covered in our guide to optimizing the Google Shopping feed. The section on free listings there describes the situation before the change and no longer applies to the EEA; the other chapters on feed quality remain valid for ads and price comparison.

How we support the transition

We cushion the loss of free product listings in three areas that work together: data, pages and campaigns. Which of them takes priority depends on how much your shop relied on free listings so far.

If you would like to know how strongly your shop is affected, get in touch: we look at feed, product pages and campaigns together and suggest an order of steps that fits your product range. Write to us via our contact page.