For hotel, flight, transport, and product searches in the European Economic Area, Google now shows a dedicated aggregator unit for comparison sites and a supplier unit for direct businesses — a layout change tied to its €460M DMA search fine.
2026-09-13 · by Moe Ameen
On September 8, 2026, Google Search Central published documentation for two new search-results features that change how commercial queries look in the European Economic Area: an aggregator unit and a supplier unit. They appear for searches about hotels, flights, long-distance trains or buses, and products, and they are shown only to users in the EEA.
The aggregator unit is a multi-provider block built for Vertical Search Services — online travel agencies, comparison-shopping services, metasearch engines, and directories. Inside it, the top-ranked eligible provider is expanded by default (with photos, prices, or ratings), and other approved providers sit behind a dropdown, so only one aggregator unit shows at a time. Getting into it is gated: a service has to be approved as a Vertical Search Service, hold content relevant to the query, and supply data through a direct feed or real-time API, on top of meeting Google's content policies. The supplier unit is the counterpart for direct providers — a hotel or an airline, say — and it needs only content Google can already crawl, but Google says it appears only alongside an aggregator unit, not on its own.
Google's own pages describe the units as a design and don't name any regulation. Trade coverage ties the change to the European Commission's July 23, 2026 Digital Markets Act decision, which fined Google €890 million in total — €460 million of it specifically for self-preferencing in Google Search — and gave the company 60 days to stop favoring its own services or face periodic penalties of up to 5% of worldwide turnover. Google published the units within that compliance window. The rollout also sits under a broader "regional differences in Search experience" hub Google set up covering the EEA, Türkiye, and South Africa, and Google has signaled that local-business queries (dining, services, things to do) may follow, without giving a date. Treat the exact mechanics and timing as a launch-window snapshot and confirm against Google's own documentation, since regulator-driven layouts keep changing.
Strip out the regulatory detail and the lesson for a business is blunt: on your most valuable EEA searches, Google just inserted a layer between the buyer and your site, and climbing into the better half of it is a feed-and-approval project you only partly control. The durable answer isn't to win a SERP whose shape a regulator can change again next quarter — it's to be the brand the buyer already has in mind *before* they run the commercial query, so a slice of your pipeline never touches that results page at all. That is a demand-generation problem, and demand generation is a volume game most businesses lose on production. [Kompozy](/) is the engine that fixes the production ceiling. Point it at one source — a property tour, a product demo, a founder explainer — and it generates a full run of distinct, on-brand pieces from a single [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief): [Clipped Shorts](/glossary/clipped-short) from real footage, avatar-narrated [Persona Shorts](/glossary/persona-shorts), brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes) posts, plus a blog article and an email newsletter.
Then it puts that presence where buyers form intent, not where Google routes it. [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes the batch across the eight social platforms plus your blog and email behind a per-post review gate — the surfaces where a traveler discovers a hotel on Instagram or a shopper saves a product on Pinterest weeks before a hotel or product search ever happens. The blog and newsletter feed the branded and direct-navigation demand that lands on your own site regardless of how the aggregator unit is arranged. Kompozy doesn't get you approved as a Vertical Search Service or build your feed — that's still Google's process. What it does is make sure your visibility isn't hostage to one commercial SERP, by keeping every owned and social channel supplied from a single [content pipeline](/glossary/content-repurposing) at a cadence a manual team can't match.
They are two search-results features Google documented on September 8, 2026 for the European Economic Area. The aggregator unit is a multi-provider block for Vertical Search Services (online travel agencies, comparison-shopping services, metasearch engines, and directories) that expands the top-ranked provider by default and hides others behind a dropdown. The supplier unit is a separate placement for direct providers like a hotel or airline. Both appear on commercial queries about hotels, flights, long-distance trains or buses, and products.
The aggregator unit is gated: a service must be approved as a Vertical Search Service, hold content relevant to the query type, supply data through a direct feed or real-time API, and comply with Google's content policies. The supplier unit needs only content Google can already crawl — no feed required — but Google says it appears only alongside an aggregator unit, not on its own.
Google's own documentation frames the units as a design and does not name any regulation. Trade coverage ties them to the European Commission's July 23, 2026 Digital Markets Act decision, which fined Google €890 million — €460 million of it for self-preferencing in Google Search — and gave the company 60 days to stop favoring its own services. Google published the units within that window. Treat the causal link as reported context rather than a Google statement.
It can. Because the units are shown only to EEA users, the search experience there differs from the same queries in other regions, so your EEA rankings and Search Console figures may diverge from your global numbers. A shift can reflect the new layout rather than a change in your content quality, so interpret EEA movement carefully before reacting to it.