Google's €890 Million Fine Is Costing Small Shops Their Free Traffic

Two months ago, the European Commission fined Google 890 million euros for rigging its own search results. Real money, real ruling, real headline day in Brussels.

Then, on September 17 and 18, Google quietly deleted every free product listing and "Popular Products" carousel from search results across the whole European Economic Area. No announcement. No transition window. Just gone.

What Actually Happened

Rank trackers caught it within a day. Productrise and Semrush both recorded 90 to 100% drops in visibility for online shops in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. If you sold anything online and depended on showing up in that free carousel, your traffic fell off a cliff over a weekend.

The fine, from 23 July, was about self-preferencing. Google had been putting its own Shopping, Hotels and Transport results at the top of search, dressed up with filters and images competitors don't get. 460 million euros of the fine was specifically for that. The other 430 million was for blocking app developers from steering users to cheaper payment options on Android.

The fix Brussels wanted was simple on paper: stop ranking your own stuff above everyone else's. Google's actual fix was blunter. Instead of ranking competing shopping listings fairly next to its own, it pulled the whole organic Shopping feature out of search. No free listings for anyone, Google included.

Google called this internally the biggest cut to search quality it's ever made. I believe that. But the real damage landed on small shops' free traffic, not on search quality.

Why It Matters For Your Shop

If you run a small shop with a website, that free carousel was one of the only ways to show up in Google search without paying for it. It cost nothing, and nobody stood between you and the shopper.

That's gone now. What's left: paid Shopping ads, or comparison shopping services that take a cut of every sale you route through them. Neither is free, and neither replaces what disappeared.

A big retail chain has a media budget line and someone whose job is to move it to paid ads by Monday morning. A shop owner running the website themselves after closing time doesn't have that, and definitely doesn't have it two months before Black Friday, which is exactly when this landed. Every euro that now has to go to Google ads is a euro that isn't going to extra staff hours in the exact weeks those hours matter most.

The regulation behind this was built to protect competition, and on the merits, cracking down on a company ranking its own products first is the right call. Brussels wrote the rule to say stop favoring yourself. Google enforced it as don't rank anyone for free. Small retailers were never the target of that outcome. They're just standing in the blast radius.

My Honest Take

This is what happens when a fair rule meets a company that's very good at reading the letter of it, and not so interested in the point of it. Google had options that kept some version of free discovery alive for merchants. It picked the one that happens to push more of them toward paid Google ads instead. Funny how that worked out.

Brussels was right to fine Google. 890 million euros for rigging search results is the right instinct, arguably still too cheap for a company that size. But "the EU is protecting small business" and "small business got poorer this week because of an EU-triggered decision" are both true at once. Know that before you build your customer acquisition plan on a platform you don't own.

If a third of your traffic came from one free channel controlled by one company, you were renting space from a landlord who just decided the ground floor doesn't exist anymore.

What I'd Do Next

Check your analytics this week. If organic Shopping traffic cratered in the last ten days, now you know why, and now you know it isn't coming back the way it was.

Spend an hour deciding where your next customer actually comes from if Google keeps deciding to hand you nothing. Email list, local search, a loyalty program, a supplier who'll co-market with you. Pick something you control.

Sources: ppc.land — Google Drops Free Shopping Listings Across Europe in Two Days (18 Sept 2026), RetailDetail EU — How Google Shopping Disappeared From European Search Results (21 Sept 2026), European Commission — Commission Fines Google €890 Million for Breaches of the Digital Markets Act (23 July 2026)