Readers who rely on Google’s results inside the European Union are now navigating the steepest drop in search result quality that the company has recorded since the current measurement approach began. New data shared by Google ties that decline directly to changes made to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
What changed in EU search results
Google has been running a series of experiments to meet its obligations under the Digital Markets Act, the EU regulation that forces large platforms to open up choice for users. Under those tests, Google has been surfacing results from rival vertical search engines and has been allowing those competitors to appear alongside, or in place of, its own specialized results such as flights, hotels, shopping and local listings.
The trade-off, Google argues, is visible quality. The company says the EU versions of its search results now show the largest amount of low-quality, unredacted content it has ever observed in any of its markets.
Why Google says the results are worse
Vertical search engines and aggregators that are now being elevated inside Google’s EU results vary widely in how they source, verify and present information. Some pull data from user reviews, third-party feeds or loosely moderated databases. Others specialize in narrow commercial niches where accuracy matters more than breadth. When these sources are placed into the same result page as Google’s own systems, which blend ranking signals, spam detection and policy enforcement, the overall mix shifts.
Google has framed the issue as a direct consequence of regulatory design rather than a choice by the company. The Digital Markets Act, in Google’s reading, leaves less room for the company to filter or rank down lower-quality sources, because doing so risks favoring its own properties over rivals.
How the company measured the drop
Google has used internal search quality evaluation processes, the kind its engineers run continuously across all markets, to compare the content surfacing inside the EU against the same queries in regions where DMA-style obligations do not apply. The output of those evaluations, according to Google, shows EU results producing more unredacted, lower-quality content than any other region it tracks.
What this means for users and businesses
For users searching in the EU, the practical effect is a result page that contains a higher share of content from sources that may not meet the bar Google’s own ranking systems would otherwise apply. For businesses that depend on Google’s organic traffic, the implication is that the competitive field inside EU results has widened, with more vertical players and aggregators able to occupy positions that Google’s own properties would previously have held.
The wider question the data raises is whether the DMA’s competition goals and the quality goals that search engines are designed to serve can be balanced without one eroding the other. Google has made clear, through this report, where it believes the current balance sits.
FAQ
What is the Digital Markets Act?
The Digital Markets Act is an EU regulation that requires large online platforms, known as gatekeepers, to follow rules that promote competition and user choice, including how they display results from rival services.
How has Google changed EU search results under the DMA?
Google has run experiments that include results from rival vertical search engines and has given those services placement alongside or instead of its own specialized results in categories such as flights, hotels, shopping and local.
What is Google measuring when it talks about search quality?
Google runs ongoing internal search quality evaluations across regions and compares the amount of low-quality, unredacted content surfacing in EU results against other markets, and reports that the EU shows the highest level it has ever recorded.
This article summarizes reporting from searchengineland.com.