Google wipes organic product carousels across Europe, replacing them with comparison site hubs

Google has begun removing organic product carousels from commercial search results in the European Economic Area (EEA) and, in their place, is showing a new section called “Comparison sites,” which groups price comparison websites and their own product listings.

Specifically, searches whose results showed an organic product carousel dropped between 90% and 100% between September 15 and 16 in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden, according to data from Productrise, a Dutch analytics and SEO platform focused on the organic visibility of products on Google. By contrast, in countries outside the EEA (the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia), organic product carousels continued to appear in the vast majority of search results.

This situation appears to be directly related to the changes Google is applying in the EU because of the penalty imposed on it by the European Commission in July for violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by favoring its own services in Search and Google Play. This fine has already led the tech company to change the way it displays search results for travel, hotels, and restaurants for users in the EU.

From product carousels to the Comparison Sites section

To replace this section, Google has introduced a new block called “Comparison Sites,” in which the search engine displays different price comparison services. Each comparison site has its own expandable section, and one of them appears open by default.

When a user clicks on one of the products shown by these comparison sites, the click takes them directly to the aggregator’s page, instead of opening a product detail page powered by Google’s Shopping Graph.

Google can also appear in the list of comparison sites. When its section is expanded, it once again shows an experience fairly similar to the old carousels, connected to its Shopping Graph. However, this information is now one step further removed from users, and the carousel cards no longer directly show the seller’s name; they only display the price and the label “and more prices,” making it possible to access additional offers.

In the case of Google’s section within “Comparison Sites,” clicking on one of the displayed products opens a new view on the right side of the screen showing an information panel based on Shopping Graph data, which displays multiple sellers for that product.

Impact on eCommerce organic visibility

Hugo Huijer, founder of Productrise, says in his analysis that “historically, around 85% of the commercially intent-driven queries we monitor have triggered at least one organic product carousel.” Moving from those visibility levels to zero would represent a major shift for merchants in the European Economic Area.

Organic carousels gave sellers the opportunity to have their product pages appear directly in a prominent position on Google, showing image, price, rating, and seller. Productrise also highlights the enormous scale of the Shopping Graph: it contains more than 60 billion product listings, more than 2 billion of which are updated every hour.

Their disappearance could translate into fewer direct organic clicks to product pages. That is why the platform recommends closely monitoring the evolution of organic traffic coming from Merchant Center over the coming weeks.

Category pages could become more important

But the change also opens up an interesting path for SEO. Google is keeping its structured-data-based carousels in the EEA, a format currently in beta that allows a website to earn its own horizontal carousel in search results. To do this, it is necessary to implement ItemList structured data together with Product markup on category pages or summary pages that link to the corresponding product pages.

The key difference is that these carousels depend on the website’s own markup, not on the feed submitted to Merchant Center. If the new model ultimately takes hold, category pages, the quality of structured data, and the SEO architecture of eCommerce sites could carry even more weight.

For now, Productrise warns that this is still a moving target. Google may continue adjusting these formats and their integration with the Shopping Graph. But what does seem clear is that the organic carousels that held a privileged place in European commercial searches for years are disappearing, and for eCommerce businesses it will be important to measure how much traffic disappears with them.

Photo: Screenshot from Google and Canva