{"id":399676,"date":"2026-09-24T02:41:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T02:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bizscoreai.com\/blog\/google-eu-dma-search-quality-drop\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T02:41:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T02:41:03","slug":"google-eu-dma-search-quality-drop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bizscoreai.com\/blog\/google-eu-dma-search-quality-drop\/","title":{"rendered":"Google reports EU DMA changes led to its largest search quality drop ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers across the EU can now see exactly what trade-offs the Digital Markets Act has forced onto Google Search, after the company published what it calls the largest measured decline in search result quality on its platform. The findings come straight from Google’s own search quality evaluations, and they put a number on a debate that has run since the DMA rules began reshaping how results are displayed in Europe.<\/p>\n

What Google actually measured<\/h2>\n

Google runs continuous side-by-side evaluations of search results, comparing the version shown in the EU against the version shown elsewhere. According to the figures Google released, the relative quality of EU search results dropped by roughly 24% in the 14 months after the DMA-driven changes went into effect. Google described this as the largest degradation of search quality it has ever recorded through this comparison system.<\/p>\n

The company framed the drop as a direct consequence of having to surface results from specialized verticals, such as flights, hotels and shopping, in dedicated units at the top of the page. To populate those units under DMA rules, Google said it had to loosen the relevance thresholds it normally applies, which pulled in more results that its own quality raters would otherwise have filtered out.<\/p>\n

Why the DMA forced these changes<\/h2>\n

The Digital Markets Act designates large platforms as gatekeepers and requires them to give third-party services more prominent placement in certain categories. For Google Search, that translated into the large vertical units European users now see above the standard blue-link results. Those units are populated from Google’s vertical indexes rather than from its main web index.<\/p>\n

Google argued that the relevance bar for those vertical results has historically been lower than the bar for core web results, and that showing them so prominently magnifies the gap. The company also said the design makes the experience feel different from what users in other regions get, even though the same person could see a markedly better set of results simply by switching to a non-EU version of the page.<\/p>\n

What Google says users can do about it<\/h2>\n

Google pointed users toward its own controls as a workaround. The company highlighted the option to switch the search experience away from the DMA-influenced layout, which removes the dedicated vertical units and returns the page to the standard result format. Google also pointed to a “results from other regions” link that lets users opt into non-EU result sets, and to the existing tools for filtering and refining queries.<\/p>\n

For businesses that depend on EU search traffic, the practical effect is that ranking inside Google’s vertical indexes now matters more than it used to. Standard SEO work on the open web index does not directly influence whether a product, flight or hotel listing appears in those dedicated units, which are pulled from Google’s own vertical databases.<\/p>\n

What this means for SEO and visibility work<\/h2>\n

The shift changes where visibility is won and lost in European search. Three points stand out from the numbers and the design constraints Google described:<\/p>\n