Why do Google search results differ by country is a question with a boring answer and an interesting one. The boring answer, the one every article gives you, is language and location and personalisation. The interesting answer is that in some countries whole types of result block exist that do not exist elsewhere, and on 8 September 2026 Google finally wrote them down in one place.
The new page is called Regional differences in Search experience, and its footer reads “Last updated 2026-09-08 UTC”. It opens like this:
“Google is evolving the search results page for certain types of queries to provide new opportunities for Vertical Search Services (VSS), Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), direct suppliers, and content providers.”
That is a filterable table of five feature types across three regions. Nothing about it is a ranking change. It is a map, and until this week there was no map.
What is an aggregator unit in Google Search?
Google’s definition, exactly as written on the regional differences page:
“A unit that provides visibility for ecosystem participants (aggregators) on the search results page.”
The dedicated page for it is more useful:
“The aggregator unit is a multi-provider feature designed for Vertical Search Services (VSSs), including Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Comparison Shopping Services, metasearch engines, and directories.”
Two mechanics worth holding on to. “The top-ranked provider’s results are expanded by default”, and “Only one aggregator unit will show at a time.” It appears on hotel, flight, long distance train or bus, and product queries, in the European Economic Area only.
What is a supplier unit, and how is it different?
An aggregator is a middleman. A supplier is the business itself. Google’s supplier unit page says:
“The supplier unit is a dedicated feature for direct providers (for example, individual hotels or airlines, brick-and-mortar business owners, or providers of services like plumbing) that appears alongside the aggregator unit. The supplier unit only appears if the aggregator unit appears.”
That last sentence is the one to remember. A hotel in Dublin cannot appear in a supplier unit unless an aggregator unit has already been triggered on that query. The two are welded together.
Compiled from Google's regional differences page and its child pages, all dated 8 September 2026, and the carousels beta documentation.
Do I need structured data to appear in these units?
For the five units, no. The supplier unit page is blunt about it:
“You don’t need to provide additional data beyond what’s accessible through web crawling to appear in this feature.”
For the aggregator unit there is a different barrier, and it is not a technical one. Google requires an application through its aggregator features form, plus “direct data feed integrations or real-time APIs”. Hotels go through a Lodging Point of Interest feed. That is a business relationship, not a markup task, and no amount of JSON-LD substitutes for it.
There is exactly one thing on this map you can win with markup, and it is a different feature: the carousel rich result, which wants “ItemList structured data in combination with at least one” of LocalBusiness, Product or Event. Google’s availability line for it is wider than the units:
“only available in European Economic Area (EEA) countries, Türkiye, and South Africa, on both desktop and mobile.”
It has been labelled beta since February 2024, which is a long beta, and worth saying out loud before anyone builds a sprint around it.
How do I actually see another country’s search results?
Badly, is the honest answer, and this is where I disagree with most of what is written on this query. The pages that rank for it are proxy and VPN vendors, and their advice is to append &gl= and &hl= parameters or to route through a foreign IP.
Those parameters shift ranking signals. They do not reliably render EEA-only units, because those units are served on requests that resolve as EEA requests under a legal obligation, not as a display preference. A UK VPN endpoint will not show you a German aggregator unit, and a screenshot from a proxy is not evidence a client’s competitor is inside one.
What I do instead on multi-country work is stop trying to reproduce the SERP and read the outcome. If a client’s German click-through rate falls while position holds steady, something is sitting above the blue links in Germany that is not sitting above them in the United States. That is a measurable pattern. Reproducing the exact pixel arrangement is not required to act on it.
Does Search Console show which country sees which features?
No, and this is the gap that matters most for anyone doing this work.
The Country dimension in the Performance report tells you where the search came from. It gives you clicks, impressions, click-through rate and position, and nothing else. There is no dimension anywhere in Search Console that names which result block a search appeared in. A German impression sitting inside an aggregator unit and a German impression sitting in an ordinary blue link are the same row of data.
Search Appearance does break out some result types, but the units on this new page are not among them. So the honest method is a country-by-country comparison of the same pages, looking for divergence in click-through rate at stable positions. That is the same before-and-after discipline I use when reading a Google update rollout, applied sideways across markets instead of across dates.
Does any of this affect a UK or a US site?
For a US site, no. None of these features exist there and the entire page is background reading.
For a UK site, also no, and this catches people out. The United Kingdom left the European Economic Area. A hotel in Manchester gets none of this while a hotel in Dublin and a hotel in Berlin compete inside a different shape of results page. Every hotel and travel guide you read about “the new Google units” is describing a search results page your UK client will never be shown.
The case where it does bite is a single brand selling into both, which is the shape of most of the store work I do: one Shopify catalogue serving several countries, the same product URLs, and two structurally different results pages reading them. Nothing on the site changes. What sits above the site changes, in one market only, and only the country split in the Performance report will ever show it to you.
Sources
- Regional differences in Search experience, Google Search Central, last updated 8 September 2026. The table, the five feature types and the opening statement.
- Aggregator unit and Supplier unit, Google Search Central, same date. Definitions, the one-unit-at-a-time rule, and the no-extra-data line.
- Carousels (beta), Google Search Central, for the ItemList requirement and the EEA, Türkiye and South Africa availability.
- Search experiences in the EEA, Google Search Central blog, 15 February 2024, the original announcement these pages document.