France: Google now opens PagesJaunes ratings before Google reviews, and we can't manage them

Since September, Google search in the EU shows local businesses in a new "Businesses" block with one tab per provider (Google's documentation, a consequence of the Digital Markets Act decision of July 2026). The Google Business Profile is now just one tab. In France, PagesJaunes is in that block on 7 of the 8 local searches I checked on google.fr today, and on 4 of them it is the tab opened first: the first ratings a customer sees are PagesJaunes ratings, not Google ones. EmbedMyReviews doesn't support PagesJaunes yet, so for French clients we can neither track these reviews, nor grow them, nor reply to them, right where Google now sends people. Several of my French clients have already asked me about it.

What I see today (google.fr, 9 November 2026, non-personalized results)

• PagesJaunes opened first, Google second: "plombier lyon", "serrurier marseille", "agence immobilière nantes".

• PagesJaunes opened first, then Planity, then Google: "coiffeur lille".

• Google opened first, PagesJaunes second: "déménageur paris", "garage automobile bordeaux".

• Zenchef opened first, then PagesJaunes, TheFork and Google: "restaurant lyon".

• Google only: "électricien toulouse".

France looks like the first country where a directory got into this block, but it comes from an EU-wide regulation. The same block is already live in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, showing only the Google tab on the searches I tested so far. Agencies with clients elsewhere in the EU will likely face the same thing with their own national directories soon.

PagesJaunes is pushing this hard with French businesses (Solocal's article), and French review platforms such as Guest Suite, Avis Vérifiés and Custplace are already PagesJaunes partners.

Proposal

1. Quick win: support the PagesJaunes write-review link in campaigns and review forms. Every listing has a stable direct URL that opens the review form, https://www.pagesjaunes.fr/contribution/votre-avis/<listing id>, so no partnership is needed for this part. Today, review forms only offer connected sources, so there is no way to send a customer to PagesJaunes at all.

2. Add PagesJaunes (pagesjaunes.fr) as a built-in review source: sync reviews and rating, so they show in the dashboard, alerts, reports and widgets. PagesJaunes has an official Reviews API (developer portal), but access is granted case by case by Solocal (apisupport@solocal.com), so this likely needs a partner agreement on your side. The listing pages are public but block automated requests.

3. Later, keep an eye on the other providers Google shows in this block (Zenchef and TheFork for restaurants in France), and on the directories that appear in other EU countries.

Replying to PagesJaunes reviews is only possible in Solocal's own tool today, so I'm not asking for that.

Screenshots: "plombier lyon" and "coiffeur lille" on google.fr, with the PagesJaunes tab open and Google collapsed below.