How significant? So much so that Near Media needed to produce a visual glossary to help us all understand what the new elements are. Their outlet is doing a great job of tracking the ongoing evolution of what appears to be Google’s response to the requirements of the Digital Markets Act, which comes into full force in 2023. Watch a demo video here.
As Near Media reports:
“The six companies designated as “gatekeepers” under the DMA, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, ByteDance (TikTok), Amazon, must comply by March 6, 2024.
This includes not giving preferential treatment to your products or services over third-party competitors. Google then created a modified search results page and new search features for the 27 countries European Economic Area across different verticals: Local, Travel, Products and Work.”
The bottom line is that whether your customers or business locations are based exclusively in Europe or are global with some locations in Europe, you need to study these new SERPs to understand how consumers are experiencing search. We look again to Near Media for a timely report on the impacts of these changes and also good advice from Mike Blumenthal that North American agencies for which European local search is key can invest in Nord VPN to experiment with overseas search .
It’s good news that European regulators are taking a strong stance on antitrust, privacy and fairness issues, but it will be a little more challenging for SEOs to study markets with different search experiences.