Google Europe's new supplier unit: is your business in it?

What changed, and why

Google Search now looks different for people in the European Economic Area (EEA) when they search for hotels, flights, products or local businesses. The trigger was a decision by the European Commission on 23 July 2026. The Commission found that Google gave its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results more prominence than similar third-party services, which the Digital Markets Act (DMA) does not allow, and fined Alphabet 460 million euros for it. Google was given 60 days to comply or face periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of its worldwide turnover.

On 8 September 2026 Reuters reported that Google had started rolling out redesigned results in Europe. In the new layout one specialised search service is shown at the top, two others follow with fewer details, and a carousel of hotels, airlines or restaurants sits below with features such as real-time prices removed. Google told Reuters that users outside the EU would not be affected, and repeated its claim that earlier DMA changes had cut free direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%. That 30% is Google's own figure; the Commission has not confirmed it.

The same day, Google added a page called "Regional differences in Search experience" to its Search Central documentation. On 18 September it added local business queries to two of the new formats. So a restaurant, shop or clinic in Europe can now see these units on its own name searches, not only hotels and airlines.

Applied to your business: if you sell into Germany, France, the Netherlands or any other EEA country, the results page your buyers see is no longer the one you see from Seoul, Hong Kong or Singapore. Check it from inside the EEA before you decide anything.

The two units: aggregators on one side, you on the other

Google's documentation splits the new space into two units that appear together.

• Aggregator unit: for comparison sites, online travel agencies, metasearch engines and directories. A business must be approved as a Vertical Search Service and send data through feeds or real-time APIs. The top-ranked aggregator's results are open by default and users can switch to another provider.
• Supplier unit: for direct providers. Google's examples are individual hotels or airlines, brick-and-mortar business owners and service providers such as plumbers. It appears only when the aggregator unit appears.

For a small business the supplier unit is the one that matters. Google lists two requirements: your website must serve users in the EEA, and you must be a direct provider that could appear for hotel, flight, long-distance train or bus, product or local business queries. Google also says you do not need to send any data beyond what it can crawl from your site. Feeds can improve how you look, but they are optional.

What this means for you: being a good direct supplier is now its own route onto the page, separate from paying a comparison site. Your website is the entry ticket.

What "serves users in the EEA" looks like on a page

Google does not define "serve" on the supplier unit page. Our reading, which is an inference and not Google's wording, is that the safest path is to make it obvious to a crawler and a human that a European visitor can actually buy or book from you. For a cross-border seller that usually means:

• A page in the buyer's language, not only English. A German shopper typing "koreanische Sonnencreme kaufen" is unlikely to land on an English-only page.
• Prices in euros, delivery terms to EEA countries and a returns policy you can actually meet.
• A clear business name and contact details. For a shop or restaurant inside Europe, the same name, address and opening hours as on your Business Profile.

Google's guidance for the aggregator unit also lists presentation tips that are sensible for any listing: factual titles in title case without "BEST DEALS" or emoji, clean original photos without watermarks, and prices that match the landing page. Those tips are written for aggregators, but the same habits make your own product and location pages easier to show in any format.

The carousel option for list pages

A third format matters if your site lists several places or products on one page. Google's "structured data carousels (beta)" page, last updated on 11 September 2026, describes a horizontally scrolling carousel of entities from one site. It is available only in EEA countries, Türkiye and South Africa. In the EEA it can appear for hotels, vacation rentals, ground transportation, flights, local businesses, things to do and products.

The rules are specific. You need a summary or category page with at least three entities, each linking to its own detail page on your site, and ItemList markup combined with a supported type such as LocalBusiness, Restaurant, Hotel, Product or Event. Pages where the "details" are only anchors further down the same page are not supported. For EEA local business and things-to-do queries, Google asks businesses to fill in its aggregator features interest form.

For your business: a restaurant group with three branches in Europe, or a brand with a product range page, can build one clean list page and test it in the Rich Results Test. A single-product site has nothing to put in a carousel and can skip this.

What is still open

Two things are not settled, so plan for change rather than a final layout. First, the Commission said Google had also proposed how to apply the same principles to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that dialogue on those would continue. The AI answers in Europe may therefore change again. Second, Google calls the carousel a beta and says requirements may change.

Outside the EEA nothing here applies. A buyer in Hong Kong, Singapore or Seoul still sees Google's standard results, so do not rebuild your whole site around a European layout. Treat the EEA as one market with its own search page, the way you already treat Naver for Korea.

If you want to know how your site looks to buyers in a specific European country, our free visibility check covers the search results in the market you name, including whether your pages give Google a reason to show you as a direct supplier.