Google's supplier unit now covers local searches in Europe. Where can a local business still appear?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The supplier unit is gated. No approved directory with eligible inventory for a query means no aggregator unit and no supplier unit.
2. Seven local verticals are in scope, from dining to trades to vets. Emergency care, mobile-only providers and purely virtual services are excluded.
3. The widely quoted 30% traffic drop measured hotel clicks in 2024. The same period showed a 0.8% net loss in hotel direct bookings. Neither measured local searches.
4. What you control is crawlable, one-per-location pages with consistent name, address and phone. Do not drop your Business Profile on the strength of a forecast.

On 18 September 2026 Google added one line to its documentation changelog: the aggregator unit and supplier unit now support local business queries. Both units had gone live across the European Economic Area ten days earlier for hotels, flights, long-distance trains and buses, and products. Most coverage has stayed with travel and shopping. This piece reads the change as a local SEO question. If you run a salon in Lyon, a plumbing firm in Rotterdam or a chain of gyms in Munich, where can you now appear, and how will you know if anything changed?

What did Google change for local searches?

Two blocks now sit on some local results pages for searchers in EEA countries.

The aggregator unit shows results from approved vertical search services: directories, comparison sites, metasearch engines and travel agencies. Only one aggregator unit appears at a time. The top-ranked provider is expanded by default and the others sit behind a switch. To take part, a directory applies through Google's aggregator features form, gets approved and sends a Local Point of Interest feed.

The supplier unit lists direct providers. Google's examples include brick-and-mortar businesses and service providers such as plumbers. You do not apply. Google says it needs nothing beyond what it can crawl from your site, and that feeds are optional extras.

The trigger is regulatory. On 23 July 2026 the European Commission fined Google €460 million for favouring its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, and gave it 60 days to comply or face periodic penalties of up to 5% of worldwide turnover. Sixty days from 23 July is 21 September, by our calculation. The local extension landed three days before that date.

Which local businesses are in scope?

Google's Search Central pages only name local businesses in general. The detail sits in the Actions Center policies written for directories, last updated 21 September. They list seven verticals and some exclusions.

These are rules for what a directory may put in its feed. Our reading is that they also mark where the units can appear, because the supplier unit depends on the aggregator unit. If no approved directory holds eligible inventory for a query, there is no aggregator unit and therefore no supplier unit. A purely virtual consultancy or an urgent care clinic should expect its results to look as they did before.

Has the local pack gone?

Nobody outside Google can say yet, and the documents do not settle it. The Actions Center overview says the aggregator unit takes the place of existing units on local results pages. It does not say which ones. Search Engine Journal checked both Search Central pages on 18 September and found no mention of the local pack or Business Profiles. Reuters, describing the 8 September layout, reported a carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants below the top aggregator, with features such as live prices removed.

So there are two readings. One is that the new blocks push the map pack down or out for some queries. The other is that they sit alongside it, as an earlier module did. The evidence for the second reading is older but measured. In 2024 Google showed a Places Sites module of directories on European local searches. Near Media recorded 100 Irish consumers choosing a restaurant on Google.ie. Forty percent never scrolled far enough to see the module. Organic results drove roughly six times the directory clicks that the module did. Most clicks went to the local pack, and Business Profiles drove most restaurant choices.

That study had a small sample and an older layout. It shows what users did when a directory module and a full local pack shared a page. It cannot show what happens if the pack is removed.

Do the traffic loss figures apply to local businesses?

Not as quoted. Google's senior vice president Nick Fox told Reuters the changes boost "online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses". Google also says earlier DMA changes cut free direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%. That number needs tracing.

It first appeared in Google's November 2024 compliance post, attributed to businesses that reported free direct booking clicks falling by as much as 30%. Google gave no method. The closest independent figure comes from Mirai, a hotel software firm. Across 3,450 hotels from January to April 2024, it found Google Hotel Ads clicks down 30% in DMA markets against other markets, without describing controls.

Mirai then widened the lens. Using GA4 data-driven attribution across more than 3,000 hotels, eight months before and after 19 January 2024, it found Google Hotels fell from 13.4% to 8.9% of reservations. Mirai says other Google placements recovered about 82% of that loss. The net change in direct reservations was 0.8%.

Google's own hotel test in late 2024, which stripped results back to plain links in Germany, Belgium and Estonia, cut hotel traffic by more than 10%. Intermediary traffic stayed roughly flat.

These figures do not contradict each other. They measure different things: clicks on one surface, all bookings across channels, and a test layout that is not live. The evidence supports a sharp loss on the surface that changed and a small net loss once users find another route. A study in the journal Marketing Science points the same way. When Google removed the clickable map from EU desktop results in January 2024, searches for "maps" and "Google Maps" rose by more than 21% against non-EU countries. The authors ruled out a decline in desktop visits to Google Maps larger than about 5%. Users added a step and came back.

None of this measured local service searches under the September 2026 layout. Both main voices also have a stake: Google opposes the remedy, and Mirai sells direct booking tools to hotels.

What can a local business control?

Not the aggregator ranking. Google does not publish how it picks the expanded provider. What you control is how easy you are to crawl and to match.

The supplier unit runs on crawled data. A site with one page per location, each with name, address, phone, hours and photos in plain HTML, gives Google something to list. A store finder that loads every location through a script gives it much less.

Matching matters on the directory side too. The local POI feed spec says name, telephone, website and location are used to match a directory's listings to entities Google already knows. Where a directory links to a business's own pages, each link must go to the page for that specific location, with no forced login or paywall. Consistent details across your site, your Business Profile and your directory listings make that match cleaner.

There is also an optional extra. Google's structured data carousel, still in beta, covers local businesses in the EEA. It needs an ItemList on a summary page with at least three items, each with an image, name and unique URL on your domain. A multi-location brand's locations page fits that shape. Google routes local businesses interested in it to the same aggregator features form.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A salon group has five salons in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Its site has a single contact page with an embedded map and a booking widget. Each salon has a Business Profile, and two list a different phone number from the site.

Beauty and personal care is a listed vertical, so the group is in scope. The method gives three fixes. First, create five location pages, each with the salon's address, hours, phone, photos and a booking link, all readable without scripts. Second, align the phone numbers across the site, the profiles and the main directories, since the feed spec matches on phone and address. Third, add an ItemList to a new salons overview page, with the five salons as items.

The group keeps its Business Profiles as they are. It cannot know whether the local pack still shows for "kapper Amsterdam" for every user. The 2024 evidence says the pack carried most choices when it did. This is an illustration of the method, not a measured outcome.

How to measure it in seven steps

1. Pick your EEA markets. List each country where you have locations or customers.
2. Build a local query set. In Search Console, filter queries with service-plus-place or "near me" patterns for each market.
3. Set the windows. Compare the weeks since 18 September with the same number of weeks before 8 September. Leave the days in between out, since layouts changed during them.
4. Add a control. If you also serve a non-EEA market such as the UK or Switzerland, run the same comparison there. A change that appears only in the EEA is more likely to come from these units than from seasonality or an update.
5. Read clicks against impressions. Falling clicks with flat impressions suggests a layout change above you. Falling impressions suggests lost visibility.
6. Check Business Profile performance. Compare website clicks, calls and direction requests for the same windows and markets.
7. Look at the page itself. Search your top ten local queries from each market and note whether an aggregator unit, a supplier unit and a local pack appear. Repeat monthly, since the Commission has not yet ruled on whether this layout complies.

Search Console has no separate report for these units. That is why the control market and the manual check matter.

What to watch next

Watch for a Commission decision on compliance, which could change the layout again. Watch the Search Central and Actions Center pages, since the local scope appeared in documentation before most coverage noticed it. If you saw an EEA ranking change in late August, our note on Google's EEA site reputation split covers the other DMA-driven change from the same period. Reviews still shape both the local pack and directory listings, and our guide to which review requests are still safe applies in every market.

Local visibility is one part of how search engines judge a brand. If you want to track it as we build our tools, join the waitlist.

Questions

What is the Google supplier unit?

It is a result block shown to searchers in the European Economic Area that lists direct providers such as hotels, airlines, shops and service businesses. It sits next to the aggregator unit, which lists approved directories and comparison sites, and it only appears when an aggregator unit appears.

Do I need to apply or send a feed to appear in the supplier unit?

No. Google says it needs no data beyond what it can crawl from your website, and that feeds can enhance a result but are optional. Applications and feeds are required for directories that want to appear in the aggregator unit, not for the businesses they list.

Has the aggregator unit replaced the local pack in Europe?

Google has not said so. An Actions Center page says the unit replaces existing units on local results pages but does not name them, and the Search Central pages do not mention the local pack or Business Profiles. Check your own EEA results by market before assuming either way.

Does this affect businesses in the UK or the US?

Not directly. The units are shown only to users in EEA countries, which excludes the UK and Switzerland. A UK or US business that serves EEA customers can still see different results in those markets, so segment Search Console by country.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, Latest Google Search documentation updates developers.google.com
2. Google Search Central, Supplier unit in Google Search developers.google.com
3. Google Search Central, Aggregator unit in Google Search developers.google.com
4. Google Search Central, Regional differences in Search experience developers.google.com
5. Google Search Central, Structured data carousels (beta) developers.google.com
6. Google Actions Center, Local Vertical Search Service overview developers.google.com
7. Google Actions Center, Local Vertical Search Service platform policies developers.google.com
8. Google Actions Center, Point of Interest (POI) feed developers.google.com
9. European Commission, Commission fines Google for breaching the Digital Markets Act (IP/26/1670) europa.eu
10. Google, An update on our compliance with the DMA blog.google
11. Mirai, DMA impact on hotels, 0.8% loss of direct reservations mirai.com
12. Mirai, DMA implementation sinks 30% of clicks and bookings on Google Hotel Ads mirai.com
13. Near Media, Is Google's DMA compliance DOA for local searches in Europe? nearmedia.co
14. Marketing Science, Is Competition Only One Click Away? The Digital Markets Act's Impact on Google Maps pubsonline.informs.org
15. Search Engine Journal, Google Adds Local Businesses To EEA Search Result Units searchenginejournal.com
16. Search Engine Journal, Google Rolls Out Redesigned Search Results Across The EEA searchenginejournal.com
17. Reuters via The Star, Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines thestar.com.my
18. Hospitality Ireland, Google says feedback shows old search result format is bad for hotels hospitalityireland.com

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