Short answer
On 17 and 18 September 2026, Google removed free product listings and the popular products carousel from search results across the European Economic Area, to comply with the Digital Markets Act. It is not an algorithm update and no recovery work will bring it back. Stores in the UK, the US and Australia are not affected.
If you run an online store in Europe and lost product traffic in mid-September, this is the first thing to rule in or out.
Nothing on your site broke. A free placement that used to sit above the ordinary results simply stopped existing in your market. Treating it as a penalty leads to months of the wrong work.
What changed
- Free product listings, the unpaid product cards built from a Merchant Center feed, were removed from search results in the EEA.
- The popular products carousel that appeared on shopping queries went with them.
- Google’s Ads Liaison confirmed on 18 September that the removal followed the Digital Markets Act decision.
- The change was close to total within about two days. One tracking service measured drops of 90 to 100 percent in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Two things did not change. Paid Shopping ads still run, and ordinary organic results are untouched. Your product and category pages can still rank exactly as before.
Who is affected
The European Economic Area means the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
- Affected: stores selling to searchers in any EEA country, wherever the store itself is based.
- Not affected: searches in the UK, the US and Australia. The UK is outside the EEA, so British product results kept their free listings.
- Most exposed: stores that never ran Shopping ads and relied on free listings as their main product visibility.
A store selling into both the UK and Germany will therefore see a drop in one market and nothing in the other. That split is itself a strong sign this is the cause.
How to tell this is your drop
- Check the break date. A step down on 16 to 18 September points here. Use daily data, not weekly.
- Segment by country. EEA countries down, the UK and other markets flat.
- Check Merchant Center. Free listing impressions falling while your feed shows no errors.
- Check your ordinary rankings. If your pages hold their positions in normal results, nothing was demoted.
All four together make the diagnosis close to certain. Country segmentation is covered in traffic dropped in one country only.
Do not confuse it with the September spam update
This is the mistake most likely to cost European stores time. The September 2026 spam update began on 24 September, about a week after free listings disappeared.
| Free listings removal | September spam update | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | 16 to 18 September | 24 September to 8 October |
| Where | EEA only | Worldwide |
| What fell | Product cards and carousels | Pages breaching a spam policy |
| Organic rankings | Unchanged | Demoted on affected pages |
A store that breaches no spam policy and dropped a week before the update was not hit by it. The update itself is covered in the September 2026 spam update.
What you can actually do
- Work with a comparison shopping service. In Europe, Shopping ads and free listings are placed through a CSS on a merchant’s behalf. Enrolling with one is the main route back into product results.
- Review your paid Shopping budget for EEA markets, now that the free placement is gone.
- Strengthen organic product and category pages. Ordinary results were not touched, so they are now a larger share of what you can win without paying.
- Keep product data accurate on the page itself: price, availability and clear product details in the HTML, with correct Product markup.
The last point has a reason beyond good practice. Comparison services report that Google introduced a new product unit in the EEA drawn partly from information on crawled pages. Clean, crawlable product pages are the part of that you control.
What not to do
- Do not rebuild your feed. It is not broken. The placement it fed no longer exists.
- Do not rewrite product pages hoping to recover. Nothing was demoted, so there is nothing to recover from.
- Do not wait for a core update. No algorithm update will return a placement removed by regulation.
- Do not disavow links or make structural changes in response. They address problems you do not have.
Will free listings come back?
Nobody outside Google and the European Commission knows. The change follows a regulatory decision, so any reversal would come from that process rather than from search quality work.
Plan as if the change is permanent, and treat a return as a bonus. Budget decisions made on the hope of a quick reversal are the ones that hurt most if it never comes.
For store traffic problems that are algorithmic, see ecommerce SEO recovery.
European store traffic fell in September?
Regulation, the spam update and a real demotion need three different responses, and they landed within a week of each other. Send your Search Console access and within 48 hours I will tell you which one hit you.
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