Google's Changes: The Disappearance of Product Carousels
Updated: 4 days ago
Image created with Artlist AI under licence.
Google's product carousels are disappearing in Europe, and the change is having an impact on e-commerce businesses.
For years, a Google search with purchase intent could trigger a product carousel displaying images, prices, ratings and sellers. For many e-commerce businesses, this format offered a prime opportunity to reach potential customers before they even visited an online store.
But in September 2026, this visibility changed dramatically across the European Economic Area (EEA). Organic product carousels — also known as Popular Products blocks — have been disappearing from numerous commercial searches, replaced by modules featuring price comparison services.
This is far from a minor change, but it doesn't mean Google Shopping has disappeared or that Shopping campaigns are no longer working. Essentially, what's changing is the architecture of the search results page, and with it, the journey between a product search and a visit to an online store's product page.
This change only affects the EEA and is linked to the EU's efforts to regulate Google's potentially monopolistic position in the search market. The EU requires Google to give greater prominence to third-party product comparison services over its own, supposedly to provide a more balanced view of the market.
Yet another intervention by our policymakers, who seem to legislate like "headless chickens" without really understanding how the different services work.
According to data published by Productrise, the presence of organic product carousels fell by between 90% and 100% within just a few days across the EEA markets analysed — Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. No comparable changes were observed in markets such as the UK, US or Australia.
Google hasn't published any figures so far, but on 8 September it confirmed a regional change to its search engine designed to give greater visibility to comparison services, direct suppliers and other providers.
The evidence is clear: in many searches, the familiar product carousel has been replaced by a comparison-site module. Instead of displaying products and retailers directly, Google now presents different comparison services, known as Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), which users can expand to explore their results. Google itself can also appear within this selection, but its product information is now one or more clicks away.
Product Carousels
As mentioned earlier, all these changes are taking place within the framework of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The legislation restricts the ability of major platforms designated as gatekeepers to favour their own services over those offered by third parties.
In practice, Google must avoid giving its specialised Shopping modules preferential placement over competing comparison services. The redesigned search results page aims to provide more space for these services and direct sellers.
For now, Google has chosen this new layout, although further modifications remain possible. The rollout is not yet fully established, and some features are still in beta.
What is clear is that e-commerce businesses will have to navigate a new era of greater volatility in commercial search results.
How Does This Affect E-commerce Businesses?
The impact extends across several areas:
1. Fewer direct organic visits to product pages: This is the main risk, as it involves a loss of visibility for organic product listings. Previously, users could move directly from Google's product carousel to a retailer's product page. Now, they may need to visit a comparison service first, browse its results and only then reach the seller.
This additional step could reduce the percentage of clicks reaching online stores directly and increase their dependence on intermediaries. The impact won't be the same for every retailer: it will depend on the industry, country, how much traffic previously came from these carousels and whether a store's product catalogue appears in the comparison services gaining visibility.
In other words, not only are retailers losing visibility, but they now also need to worry about ranking well on comparison platforms that have suddenly gained prominence, almost by magic.
2. Category pages become more important again: The disappearance of a format focused on individual products could increase the SEO value of category pages, subcategories and curated product selection pages. Having thousands of correctly indexed product pages is no longer enough: e-commerce businesses need pages capable of responding to searches such as "women's running shoes", "small sofas" or "best laptops for work".
Moreover, this approach — moving beyond simply displaying products to providing specific answers to user searches — will become increasingly important for AI agents, making it even more relevant.
These pages should combine useful content, properly managed crawlable filters, internal linking and structured data. The goal isn't to fill them with generic text, but to turn them into genuinely useful resources that help customers make purchasing decisions.
3. Greater importance of price comparison services: CSS platforms could become a more significant gateway to product catalogues. This creates an additional distribution opportunity, but it also introduces costs, commercial conditions and less control over the customer experience.
Retailers need to evaluate each service's actual coverage by market and category, pricing model, attribution, traffic quality, feed management, ranking transparency and potential overlap with other channels.
4. Greater pressure on customer acquisition profitability: Customer acquisition costs (CAC) could rise, putting return on advertising spend (ROAS) under pressure.
A decline in organic product traffic may push some demand towards paid channels, affiliate marketing, marketplaces and CSS platforms. This could increase competition for the same high-intent customers and drive acquisition costs upwards.
That doesn't mean CPC will automatically rise or ROAS will necessarily fall, as it's still too early to have solid data. However, this is a reasonable and plausible consequence, and some e-commerce businesses are already experiencing it.
Ultimately, our policymakers introduce legislation without properly assessing its impact: who benefits, who loses and whether the changes genuinely deliver anything positive. As usual, it feels more like political posturing designed to keep portraying someone as the villain — in this case, Google, which seems to be a particularly popular target.
Google Shopping Campaigns
Shopping campaigns are not disappearing as a result of this change. Shopping ads continue to appear in Google's search results.
The modification primarily affects organic product modules. However, it may indirectly influence paid campaigns for three reasons:
The visual context of the SERP changes. An ad may attract more or less attention depending on the modules displayed around it.
The customer journey may change. If product comparisons move towards other intermediaries, each channel's contribution to conversion could also shift.
Competition for high-intent demand may increase. E-commerce businesses losing organic traffic could increase their investment in Shopping, Performance Max or Search campaigns.
How to Prepare for the Change
Although considerable uncertainty remains about how these changes will affect different online retailers, there are several recommendations worth following:
Measure your exposure to the change: Compare performance in the weeks before and after the changes:
Organic clicks and impressions for product and category pages in Search Console.
Organic product clicks and visibility in Merchant Center.
Sessions and sales from organic search in GA4 or your preferred analytics platform.
Shopping and Performance Max performance: impressions, impression share, CPC, conversion rate, ROAS and margins.
All of this should be analysed by country, device (desktop vs. mobile), brand and product category.
We need to identify which queries and products are losing the most visibility and where that visibility is moving.
Separate SEO, free listings and advertising: Merchant Center and Google Ads data are related, but they don't operate according to exactly the same logic. A decline in organic product carousels doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem with the advertising feed, and a stable paid campaign can coexist with falling organic clicks. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Shopping campaigns won't experience increased competition for the same demand, with a corresponding impact on performance.
Strengthen category pages: Priority should be given to categories with the highest demand, strongest margins or greatest traffic losses. Areas to review include:
Search intent and semantic coverage.
Titles, headings and useful introductory content.
Product visibility and logical product ordering.
Internal links to subcategories and strategically important products.
Filter management, pagination, canonical tags and indexing.
Information that makes comparisons easier: intended uses, product differences, price ranges, availability and selection criteria.
Implement the new structured-data carousel: Google offers a new site-specific carousel in beta, also known as a host carousel, for category and summary pages. To be eligible, a page must implement ItemList combined with Product structured data, include at least three items and link to individual product pages within the same domain.
As this is a beta feature, Google requires the markup to cover items visible on the category page and recommends validating the implementation using the Rich Results Test and Search Console.
Being eligible doesn't guarantee that the carousel will appear, but failing to prepare the markup eliminates that possibility.
Ultimately, this is a beta initiative intended to mitigate the impact of the EU measures, although its exact operation is still far from clear.
Improve the quality and consistency of product data: The new organic carousel relies on structured data rather than the Merchant Center feed. Nevertheless, both should present consistent information. It's important to review:
Product identifiers: GTIN, MPN and brand.
Product titles and descriptions.
Prices, discounted prices and promotional dates.
Availability and product variants.
High-quality images in different formats.
Shipping costs, delivery times and returns.
Genuine reviews with correctly implemented markup.
It's important to minimise discrepancies between the website, structured data and product feed, as they reduce data quality and may lead to disapprovals or loss of eligibility.
Evaluate comparison shopping services: We need to analyse which comparison services appear for our priority searches and verify whether our products are included. Ideally, before entering into an agreement with a new partner, we should request a pilot with measurable results, including incremental traffic, conversion rates, cost per sale, margins and the degree of overlap with Google Shopping or other CSS platforms.
Protect Shopping profitability: While these changes are settling in, it's advisable to:
Avoid making major changes to budgets, bidding strategies, product feeds and creative assets simultaneously.
Conduct a thorough review of search terms and performance by category.
Segment products according to margins and price competitiveness.
Review attribution models.
Measure profitability and contribution margins, not just ROAS.
Reduce dependence on a single gateway: This change demonstrates how visibility provided by a third-party platform can disappear almost overnight. It's essential for e-commerce businesses to strengthen their own assets: brand, customer relationships, automation, content creation, community building and other channels they can control.
Ultimately, Google hasn't stopped displaying products or removed Shopping advertising. What it's doing in the EEA is redistributing visibility between its own ecosystem, comparison services and direct sellers.
For any e-commerce business, the immediate risk is losing direct organic traffic to product pages. However, the answer cannot simply be to increase advertising investment. More work is needed: strengthening category pages, improving data quality, assessing the new structured-data system, evaluating comparison services and measuring performance more thoroughly.
The landscape is changing, and external factors are forcing us to diversify our customer acquisition channels. But just as product carousels have become a target for regulators, other services could face similar scrutiny in the future. And we'll need to keep adapting.
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