A familiar part of Google shopping searches is disappearing across Europe.
Organic product carousels, often displayed as “Popular products,” have largely vanished from search results in the European Economic Area. According to data from Productrise, their appearance across monitored commercial searches dropped by roughly 90% to 100% within days in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Outside the EEA, including the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, Productrise observed no comparable decline.
For European retailers, the change removes a prominent source of free product visibility and could alter how shoppers move from Google searches to individual product pages.
Before the change, Productrise says around 85% of the commercial-intent searches it monitored triggered at least one organic product carousel.
These results allowed consumers to see products, images, prices, ratings, and sellers directly in Google Search. Much of the information was connected to Google’s Shopping Graph, which contains more than 60 billion product listings.
In the EEA, Google is now replacing many of these results with a new “Comparison Sites” section. Instead of immediately displaying products from individual retailers, Google presents comparison shopping services in expandable sections.
Clicking a product within one of these sections can take the shopper to the comparison service rather than directly to the retailer.
Google itself can also appear as one of the comparison options, but its Shopping Graph-powered product experience is consequently placed deeper in the search journey.
The redesign is connected to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which restricts designated gatekeepers from favoring their own services over competing services.
Google introduced redesigned EEA search results in September as part of its response to the regulation. The company has argued that the changes reduce the quality of Search, while European regulators have sought to create more opportunities for competing comparison services.
Whatever the regulatory debate, the practical consequence for e-commerce businesses is immediate: a search feature many retailers used for organic product discovery has become significantly less visible.
For smaller online stores in particular, losing a free route into prominent Google product results could make acquiring visibility more difficult.
The disappearance of the traditional carousel does not mean product optimization is becoming irrelevant. It may change where that optimization matters.
One particularly interesting possibility is Google’s structured data carousel for EEA search results.
Unlike the former product carousels, this format is based on structured data placed directly on a retailer’s website. Google explains that category or summary pages can use ItemList structured data together with Product markup to become eligible for a horizontal carousel linking to products on that website.
That creates a different relationship between product data and search visibility.
Instead of relying primarily on a Merchant Center feed to place individual products into Google’s Shopping experience, retailers may need to pay closer attention to how clearly their own websites organize and describe their assortments.
Category pages, product markup, attributes, identifiers, images, and the relationships between products could all become more important parts of organic product discovery.
This is where the change becomes particularly relevant to Icecat’s ecosystem.
Retailers increasingly need product information to work across multiple environments at the same time. The same product may appear on a retailer’s own product page, a category page, a marketplace, a comparison shopping service, an AI assistant, and a search engine.
Each channel may present the information differently, but the underlying product still needs consistent identifiers, specifications, descriptions, images, and attributes.
Structured product content gives retailers a reusable foundation for maintaining that consistency.
The Google change also illustrates why depending too heavily on a single discovery format can be risky. A product carousel that was prominent one week can almost disappear the next because of a regulatory or platform decision.
Retailers cannot control Google’s interface, but they can control the quality and structure of the product information they publish and distribute.
Google’s European redesign arrives while product discovery is already becoming more complex.
AI Overviews are taking up more space during informational searches, consumers increasingly use AI assistants for product research, marketplaces remain major discovery channels, and comparison services now have a more prominent position in European Google results.
The route from a search query to a product page is therefore becoming less direct.
For e-commerce businesses, the response should not simply be to abandon Merchant Center or traditional product SEO. Google’s EEA search experience is still evolving, and the current implementation may change again.
But the disappearance of product carousels provides a useful reminder: retailers do not own the discovery channels on which they depend.
What they can own is the quality of their catalog.
As e-commerce discovery becomes distributed across search engines, comparison sites, marketplaces, and AI systems, accurate and structured product information gives retailers something that can travel between all of them.
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