Study: Google shows competitors' ads in just 2% of product-ad spots in Germany and 0.4% in the UK, following rollout of new ad bidding system after EU fine
Context & Ripple Effects
After the EU's antitrust order, Google offered to auction off shopping ad spaces to rivals rather than change its results page outright — a remedy Google itself would operate, with a price cap on its own bids. This study is the first hard measurement of what that auction actually delivers: competitors' ads appear in just 2% of product-ad spots in Germany and 0.4% in the UK.
The numbers matter because they preview the enforcement arc that follows. A later study found Google's shopping search still disadvantages EU rivals years after the crackdown, and by 2025 the EU had escalated to a [[a:889837|€2.95B fine with a preliminary stance that Google must divest parts of its ad-tech business]].
First-order effects
- Rival shopping services buying through the new auction get near-zero shelf space — 0.4% of UK spots means the compliance mechanism exists on paper but barely changes what shoppers see.
- EU enforcers now have quantified evidence that a behavioral remedy designed and run by Google fails to restore competition, strengthening the case against accepting similar self-administered fixes.
Second-order effects
- Competitors' ad budgets keep flowing to Google either way: if rivals can't win impressions in the auction, their spend shifts back into Google's own formats, offsetting any revenue the remedy was meant to give up.
- The weak result pushes regulators toward structural remedies — the divestment stance in the later €2.95B ad-tech fine reads as the direct institutional response to behavioral fixes that measured out at fractions of a percent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, EU antitrust practice shifts from negotiated conduct remedies toward forced separation in platform markets, since a dominant firm running its own compliance auction can tune outcomes below the threshold where competition becomes real.
- Merchants and comparison-shopping services face a durable structure in which access to product-ad inventory depends on terms set by their largest competitor, keeping the bottleneck in Google's hands regardless of which remedy is nominally in force.
The trend: Antitrust enforcement against dominant ad platforms is moving from self-operated behavioral remedies, which measurably fail, toward structural divestment.