Our Complicated Quest To Understand Google Algorithms Post Digital Market Act
Is Google not respecting European laws? Or only taking a long time to adapt.
March 26th, 2024, was a typical day at the office. I got in early and got myself a coffee before sitting at my desk.
I say “my desk,” but it’s supposedly a flexible open space — which is not “flexible” since everyone always sits in the same place. Anyway.
I opened my laptop and checked my emails to see if anything urgent needed my attention.
Our care team has a new request. As always, the priority is critical. I’ll take a quick look to see if it is this time.
A client complains that his reviews are not showing up on his Google Business Profile.
My reaction then was: “I have no idea what Google Business Profile is, but how bad can it be?”
As I write this text in March 2025, a year later, this care request is still not closed.
You see, on March 6th, 2024, the European Union released the Digital Market Act (DMA), which has been messing with our company’s core business ever since.
In this article, I want to use my experience as a lead developer for Skeepers, one of the European leaders in review management, trying to understand Google updates post-DMA.
You’ll learn about Google search inner workings and how Google has been taking its time to keep its end of the bargain with European laws since the DMA release.
1 — DMA, what is this anyway?
This new legislation aimed to combat internet giants' anti-competitive practices and address the imbalances caused by their dominance in the European digital market.
They must make space for their competitors on their platform and promote their services.
As a company working in the European Union, how great is that? After one year, The answer is not so great — I’ll get to the why soon.
For example, you might have noticed some changes on Google lately. The most infuriating one is that the map is no longer clickable when you search for a location—you can thank the DMA for this.
Or the presentation of the new places if you search for restaurants or hotels.
This is not the first time the European Union has implemented rules on big tech. They released the Digital Service Act on August 25th, 2023, which aimed at more transparency, fighting against illicit content and ad control.
However, in this article, I want to focus on the change that has significantly impacted our work life for the past year: the need for Google to display where the reviews are coming from.
2 — DMA and Google Business Profile
Let’s say you're looking for a shop where you can buy your cat the best food because he’s such a good cat.
A friend recommended the brand “Animalis,” but you want to check if it has good reviews before going.
So you search on Google for “Animalis Paris 12,” close to where you live.
You’ll get the Google Business Profile of this place.
There is a lot of helpful information about the shop, and if you scroll a little bit, you will see what we want to talk about: the reviews.
You can find two review providers on this screenshot: Google and Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages).
You’ll see Google always appears (how shocking!), but for the other companies, it’s another story.
In my introduction, I said that a client warned us that his reviews were not showing up anymore. It’s because it used to work.
On the older version before the DMA, Google showed the rating and number of reviews from other providers in GBP but not the reviews.
Our company (here, avis-verifies.com) would always show up on Google’s search results.
But that was before…
So, we went on a quest to regain our place on Google’s search results, a significant part of our business.
The question we first need to answer is: How does Google gather those reviews, and what do we need to do for our reviews to show up on Google Business Profile?
3 — How does Google manage to know so much?
There’s so much going on Google’s search result page. As we saw earlier, the architecture of the results page varies depending on what you search for.
We saw the places or business profile page. If I search for movies in my city, I get the “films playing” architecture.
You get the gist.
To gather all this data, Google uses a technology called Rich Snippets.
Google’s bots crawl all web pages and look for particular content that websites add to their pages. This gives Google's bot the information on the page in a properly formatted way (JSON-LD).
For our reviews to be picked up by Google, we must display pages for the shop on our domain that show the reviews. And those pages need to implement the correct Rich Snippet.
The Rich Snippets data follows the schema.org schemas. So, a shop will be a LocalBusiness object, and reviews—well, a list of Review objects.
It seems straightforward, but it gets tricky because Google does not tell you the correct Rich Snippets.
Well, I’m lying — kind of. You get a documentation. You even get a testing tool for your implementation.
However, after one year of testing, we found that having the perfect Rich Snippet that fits the documentation and passes the testing tool test does not guarantee you’ll get the reviews in your Google Business Profile.
4 — Ok, but what have we tested?
Something changed on March 6th, 2024, and our goal was to find out what it was since Google didn’t want to tell us.
We followed a scientific trial and error method on a small batch of subjects on selected clients to see if our changes would bring results.
Microdata to JSON-LD
The first change we made was to switch from the old method of writing RichSnippet in your HTML page (Microdata) to the new one.
Microdata uses HTML inline tags to provide schema.org information.
<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication">
<span itemprop="name">Angry Birds</span> - REQUIRES
</div>Meanwhile, JSON-LD is a script tag with JSON inside.
{
"@context": "https://json-ld.org/contexts/person.jsonld",
"@id": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon",
"name": "John Lennon",
}Result: Failed (No reviews on GBP)
Product to LocalBusiness
In the past, we used a trick in the RichSnippets by using a Product tag instead of a LocalBusiness for our shop's page. It worked, and the ratings were shown in the search results.
However, with the latest change post-DMA, we thought Google had fixed that, and only the accurate LocalBusiness tag would show ratings for a shop.
We were wrong; switching to LocalBusiness did not restore us to Google Business Profile and even caused us to lose the ratings in the search results.
Result: Failed (No reviews on GBP + No ratings in the search result)
So we had to roll back this change because our clients can’t lose the ratings in the search results, and we also can’t keep using the product tag for our local businesses.
We’re in a bit of a pickle.
We think (it’s always uncertainties with Google) that since most of our shop pages use the Product tag in the RichSnippets, the Google algorithm is lost by only switching a small number of pages to LocalBusiness.
So we have been slowly increasing the number of shops using this format, but nothing has happened.
We haven't reached the big-bang switch all clients and pray moment yet, but it feels like it’s coming…
Combination of Product and Local business
Product didn’t work. Localbusiness didn’t work. Why not try both?
It made no sense on paper, and it didn’t work. A physical store shouldn’t be a Product in the RichSnippets, and it shouldn’t be both simultaneously.
But we tried on a tiny sample of clients anyway.
Result: Failed (No reviews on GBP + No ratings in the search result)
Adding phones, email, and opening hours
Our next thought process went to check what our competitors were doing—pillars of online reviews like Trustpilot or Pages Jaunes (in France).
Our shop pages are primarily about reviews; the shop information is just the basics (name, address, website URL). Our competitors are more global, with phone numbers, email, geolocation, etc.
Those competitors were showing up on Google Business Profile while we weren't.
Maybe Google is struggling to link the Business Profile and our page.
So we decided to enrich our pages with more information about the shop, such as its phone number, email address, and opening hours.
We added the exact information in the shop’s Google Business Profile to our page.
No complicated development, “move fast, break things” way, we picked a few shops and hardcoded the values in our code.
After a few weeks (even months), nothing changed.
And guess what? Our competitors started disappearing from GBP as well. As I write this article, Trustpilot is nowhere to be seen in Google Business Profile reviews.
Result: Failed (No reviews on GBP)
Parent Organization
Our latest test was to enrich our Rich Snippets for the shops even more.
In the rich snippet, you must define an Organization for the review provider (Skeepers in our case) and a LocalBusiness for the shop the reviews are about (Animalis Paris 12 in our example).
This was already live.
But we tried to add another layer to our RichSnippet, added the Organization for the brand (Animalis), and linked the LocalBusiness to the Animalis organization through the “parentOrganization.”
You guess it by now. Nothing happened.
Result: Failed (No reviews on GBP)
5 — Reviews on GBP status in 2025
I discussed our case and even mentioned some competitors, but let’s look at the global state.
If I search for “Avis animalis Paris 12” on Google.
Google is there, and “Pages Jaunes” is also present. But there’s a catch.
If we click on Pages Jaunes, we get redirected to a page that makes no sense. It's a category page for “Belgian Shepherd Breeding” in Paris.
Let’s take another example if I search for “Avis Animalis Bordeaux.”
Pages Jaunes disappeared while their page exists and has reviews: https://www.pagesjaunes.fr/pros/05881114
It's the same RichSnippet, but it's not showing up.
The last example for Animalis is if I search for “Animalis Aubagne.”
Pages Jaunes is there, and the link is correct.
3 different behaviors for the same RichSnippets structure on Pages Jaunes pages.
Fun fact: I said Pages Jaunes was a competitor, but they are our partners, and most of the reviews on their page are gathered by us and sent to them.
But that’s not it! Let’s keep digging.
If I search for “Avis Objective Code Macon,” I get a different Google Business Profil review structure.
Hooray 🎉! Our reviews for this shop are showing up. But why?
Everything is the same as for the other pages that don’t work.
And there are probably other structures Google is testing that we haven’t found yet; this is mind-boggling.
6 — Our next steps
This golden goose chase for Google Business Profile taught us a lot about the inner workings of Google’s Search Engine.
This past year, we updated our clients’ shop pages, added more content, and fixed bugs, improving our SEO by a substantial margin.
About Google Business Profile, we don’t have much choice but to wait for Google to update while keeping up to date with the latest RichSnippets updates.
The European Union is supposedly about to charge them because they did not comply with the Digital Market Act.
So, we are not alone in this struggle — I guess that’s a good thing.
Now we wait…
Happy birthday to the Digital Market Act 🎉
