Amid the rise of ChatGPT, and conversational search more broadly, Google is losing ground as the key discovery platform on the web.
Well, by “losing ground”, I mean that its share of the search engine market dropped below 90% for the first time in a decade last year. So it’s still by far the dominant discovery tool, but the AI shift is having at least some impact on its core business.
As you can see in this new chart, created by the team at Visual Capitalist, while Google has lost ground slightly, Bing has increased, which is presumably due to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, which has led to Bing’s integration of more AI elements (while ChatGPT also displays Bing results).
Indeed, back in 2023, after Microsoft announced the integration of ChatGPT results into its Bing search engine, Bing downloads increased tenfold as a result.
Long considered the “other” search engine, generative AI has made Bing more relevant, though Google is working to counter that with its own AI elements.
Which, presumably, will ensure that Google remains the leader in online discovery, but it is interesting to note this shift, and to consider what the AI shift means for discovery moving forward.
Alphabet’s year included product mishaps, layoffs, changes to processes and divide among the workforce.
As Google faced some of the most intense pressure its experienced since going public two decades ago, so too did CEO Sundar Pichai, who took the helm in 2015.
The challenges led many staffers to question Pichai’s vision for the company.
Google’s blowout earnings report in April, which sparked the biggest rally in Alphabet shares since 2015 and pushed its market cap past $2 trillion for the first time, tempered fear that the company was falling behind in artificial intelligence.
As executives enthusiastically talked about the results with Google’s employees at an all-hands meeting the following week, it was clear that Wall Street viewed things differently than the company’s workforce.
“We’ve noticed a significant decline in morale, increased distrust and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce,” one employee wrote in a comment that was read by executives at the meeting. “How does leadership plan to address these concerns and regain the trust, morale and cohesion that have been foundational to our company’s success?”
The comment was highly rated on an internal forum.
“Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases” another top-rated employee question read.
That meeting set the stage for what would be a year of contrasting takes from the company’s vocal workforce. As Google faced some of the most intense pressure its experienced since going public two decades ago, so too did CEO Sundar Pichai, who took the helm in 2015.
Pichai oversaw a steady stream of revenue growth this year in key areas like search ads and cloud. The company rolled out ground-breaking technologies, rounded out its AI strategy despite a slew of embarrassing product incidents and saw its stock price rise more than 40% as of Thursday’s close, ahead of the S&P 500 but trailing rivals Meta and Amazon.
Over the course of 2024, many staffers questioned Pichai’s vision following product mishaps in the first half of the year as well as internal shake-ups and layoffs, according to conversations with more than a dozen employees, audio recordings and internal correspondence.
As the second half of the year progressed and Google rolled out a number of eye-catching AI products, Pichai’s standing improved, though some scepticism remains, sources told CNBC.
Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis (L) and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai open the tech titan’s annual I/O developers conference focusing on how artificial intelligence is being woven into search, email, virtual meetings and more. Glenn Chapman | AFP | Getty Images
The AI race pressure cooker
After the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, the tech industry saw an influx of AI products from Microsoft, with its Co-pilot AI assistant, and Meta, which placed its Meta AI chatbot in the search functions of its apps, as well as from hot startups like OpenAI and Perplexity.
The popularity of those tools has eaten into Google’s grip on U.S. search. The company’s share of the search advertising market is expected to dip below 50% in 2025, which would be the first time falling below that mark in more than a decade, according to research firm eMarketer.
Google responded to the pressures from new AI tools with offerings of its own. The company in 2024 rebranded its family of AI models as Gemini and released a number of products that were well received. But in its scramble to play catch-up, the company also released a pair of AI products that initially proved embarrassing.
In February, Google launched Imagen 2, which turned user prompts into AI-generated images. Immediately after it was introduced, the product came under scrutiny for historical inaccuracies discovered by users. Notably, when one user asked it to show a German soldier in 1943, the tool depicted a racially diverse set of soldiers wearing German military uniforms of the era.
The company pulled the feature, and Pichai told employees the company had “offended our users and shown bias,” according to a memo. Google said it would take a few weeks to relaunch Imagen 2, but it ended up being six months before it was revived as Imagen 3 in August.
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a small crowd at a hacker house in March, in a video posted to YouTube. “It was mostly due to just not thorough testing.”
The launch of AI Overview in May caused a similar reaction.
That product showed users AI summaries atop Google’s traditional search results. Pichai hyped the product, calling it the biggest change to search in 25 years. Once again, users were quick to find problems.
When asked “How many rocks should I eat each day,” the tool said, “According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day.” AI Overview also listed the vitamins and digestive benefits of rocks.
Google responded by saying it would add more guardrails to AI Overview for health-related queries but said the mistakes weren’t hallucinations, and were rather just rare edge cases. Search Vice President Liz Reid told employees at an all-hands meeting in June that AI Overview’s launch shouldn’t discourage them from taking risks.
“We should act with urgency,” Reid said. “When we find new problems, we should do the extensive testing but we won’t always find everything and that just means that we respond.”
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Beyond its AI blunders, Google also saw its greatest regulatory challenges to date in 2024.
In August, a federal judge ruled that the company illegally holds a monopoly in the search market. The Justice Department in November asked that Google be forced to divest its Chrome internet browser unit as a remedy for the ruling
The DOJ’s request represents the agency’s most aggressive attempt to break up a tech company since its antitrust case against Microsoft, which reached a settlement in 2001.
The remedies are expected to be decided next summer, and Google has said it will appeal, likely dragging out the situation a couple more years, but the company faces more antitrust hurdles.
In a separate case, the DOJ accused the company of illegally dominating online ad technology. That trial closed in September and awaits a judge ruling. In October, a U.S. judge issued a permanent injunction that will force Google to offer alternatives to its Google Play app store for Android phones. After the ruling in October, Google won a temporary pause on the ruling, meaning it won’t have to open up Android to more app stores yet.
A search for vision
Amid the external pressure, Google notched some notable victories particularly toward the end of 2024, leading to a more positive sentiment from people within and outside the company.
Google successfully launched its most powerful suite of new Gemini models that underpin all of the company’s AI products, including its lightweight model Gemini Flash, which has been popular among developers. YouTube’s combined ad and subscription revenue over the past four quarters surpassed $50 billion.
In the third quarter, Google saw the fastest-growing cloud business across the big tech players, up 35% over last year, with operating margins of 17%. The company has also seen double-digit revenue growth for each of the past four quarters and launched Trillium, its powerful sixth generation Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which were also found to have powered Apple’s AI models.
Despite the blunders, AI Overview reached nearly 1 billion monthly users by the end of October. Demand for AI software has also driven consistent growth for the company’s cloud infrastructure. And Google launched an impressive video generation product, Veo 2, this month as well as an updated AI note-taking product, NotebookLM.
Beyond AI, Google in December announced Willow, a chip the company calls its biggest step in the march toward commercially viable quantum computing. The Waymo self-driving car unit was also a bright spot, expanding its robotaxi service to three cities and laying the groundwork for even more expansion in 2025. The company has delivered 4 million fully autonomous rides this year, with plans to commercially launch in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta next year.
A Google quantum processor “Sycamore” is held up to the camera wearing blue gloves. In 2019, Google made a breakthrough in quantum computing. Peter Kneffel | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
But as Pichai approaches a decade running Google and starts his sixth year as CEO of parent Alphabet, questions remain about his ability to guide the company into the future.
Internally, employees routinely criticize leadership on the company’s Memegen messaging board, and some have aired their grievances publicly.
“Google does not have one single visionary leader,” a Google software engineer wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year that received more than 8,500 reactions. “Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.”
In October, Google announced it would shake up the leadership of its ads and search division.
The company replaced longtime search boss Prabhakar Raghavan with Nick Fox, a deputy of Raghavan’s and a career Google employee. Raghavan was given the title of “chief scientist,” but internally, he is now listed as an “IC,” or individual contributor.
Google also shifted the team working on its Gemini AI app to the Google DeepMind division, under AI head Demis Hassabis. Employees praised Pichai’s leadership shuffle, but some complained that the moves should’ve happened sooner.
Notably, some employees were perturbed when Raghavan addressed employees at an all-hands meeting in April, when he urged them to move faster, according to several people who spoke with CNBC. Raghavan noted that the staffers working to fix the failed Imagen 2 tool had increased their workloads from 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct it in a timely manner.
Pichai has made efforts to get Google back to its nimble startup-like culture.
When addressing employees, Pichai often name-checked co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to remind them of Google’s scrappy roots. He’s flattened the company, removing 10% of middle management, according to audio of a December all-hands meeting. And in the spring, Pichai greenlit a hackathon, allowing employees to build using Google products that have yet to be announced. Pichai has also personally joined meetings with Google’s Labs team and enabled them to move quickly on products like NotebookLM, one of the company’s hit AI products in 2024.
Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin speaks during a press conference after the third game of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google-developed supercomputer AlphaGo at a hotel in Seoul on March 12, 2016. Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images
After Brin’s hacker house appearance in March, some employees internally joked he should retake the helm, nostalgic for what they perceived as a visionary leader devoid of corporate speak.
Brin co-founded Google with Page in 1998, but he stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. Brin, who remains a board member and a principal shareholder with a stake worth more than $140 billion, began appearing more frequently on campus starting in 2023, as part of an effort to help ramp up Google’s position in the hypercompetitive AI market. Employees, particularly working in AI and DeepMind said they’ve seen Brin walking around the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters throughout the year and have been able to ask him questions for projects they’re pursuing.
Despite Brin’s re-emergence, several employees told CNBC they’re doubtful he could adequately run what has become an increasingly larger and complex corporation.
Employees said that although Pichai didn’t strike them as particularly visionary or as a wartime leader, it’s hard to find someone better suited for the job, given all the complexities of Alphabet. The key quandary remains: move too early and risk widespread criticism; move too late and risk missing the boat.
Culture Clashes
Through the year, morale inside Google wavered. Efforts to cut costs across the company in order to invest more in AI resulted in some teams feeling bifurcated and created yet another challenge for Pichai.
Within the company’s AI and DeepMind divisions, morale is mostly high, according to employees, boosted by hefty investments. Elsewhere, the vibes have been marred by cost cuts, bureaucracy and declining trust in leadership, employees said.
DeepMind and AI teams have held off-sites, team-building activities, and have much bigger travel and recruiting budgets, people familiar with the matter said. In the spring, the company moved employees out of an eight-story office on San Francisco’s waterfront Embarcadero street and replaced them with AI and AI adjacent teams.
Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis gives a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024. Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images
A meme posted internally in November summed it up.
The meme featured a photo of the cast of “Wicked” actors, where one, labelled “execs” looked longingly at one fellow actor labelled “Gemini” while ignoring the other beside her, which was labelled as “users.”
A Google spokesperson contested the idea that AI workers are receiving favourable treatment and said higher travel and recruiting budgets are not exclusive to AI teams or DeepMind.
“Most Googlers, regardless of team, continue to feel positively about our mission and the company’s future, and are proud to work here,” the spokesperson said.
A fewemployees say they’re no longer incentivized by the prospects of landing a promotion, which have become harder to achieve, and rather by the hope of avoiding layoffs.
Despite slashing 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of its workforce, in 2023, Google has continued eliminating roles this year. In her first public statements as Google’s CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, told Wall Street in October that one of her top priorities would be to drive more “cost efficiencies” across the company in order to invest more in AI.
“I think any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities,” Ashkenazi said.
That month, Google posted a job listing for a “Central Reorg Support Team Partner.” The responsibilities of that fixed-term contract position would include consulting with local HR teams and noted the need for the support staff’s “ability to operate with empathy and diffuse/de-escalate challenging conversations/situations.”
“Hire the smartest people so they can tell us what to do,” one employee wrote on the internal forum in meme-style font atop the images of Brin and Page. “Hire a reorg consultant so they can tell us how to layoff the smartest people,” another said.
Google ultimately took the job listing down.
Pro-Palestinian protesters are blocked the Google I/O developer conference entrance to protest Google’s Project Nimbus and Israeli attacks on Gaza and Rafah, at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, United States on May 14, 2024. Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Touting its AI technology to clients, Pichai’s leadership team has been aggressively pursuing federal government contracts, which has caused a heightened strain in some areas within the outspoken workforce since the beginning of the year.
Google terminated more than 50 employees after a series of protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon that provides the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and AI services. Executives repeatedly said the contract didn’t violate any of the company’s “AI principles.”
However, documents and reports show the company’s agreement allowed for giving Israel AI tools that included image categorization, object tracking, as well as provisions for state-owned weapons manufacturers. Earlier this month, a New York Times report found that four months prior to signing on to Nimbus, officials at the company worried that signing the deal would harm its reputation and that “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations.”
In an all-hands meeting in April, a highly rated question asked why employees who did not participate in the protests were also fired, which was reported and cited in a National Labour Relations Board complaint from affected employees. Chris Rackow, Google’s security chief, took the stage at the all-hands and rebutted those claims.
“This was a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying work spaces, and making other employees feel unsafe,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the company “carefully confirmed” that every person terminated was involved in the protests. “By any standard, their behaviour was completely unacceptable.”
That round of job eliminations underscored Google’s clampdown on internal discussions related to hot-button topics, including politics and geopolitical conflicts, which was encouraged by executives several years prior.
One internal meme that got more than 2,000 likes, compared Google to Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker. The meme shows an image of a smiling childhood Skywalker, framed by one of the company’s original, colourful employee badges. The meme progresses Skywalker’s age in two later versions of the badge.
The final badge shows Darth Vader working for “Google,” spelled out in the font of IBM’s logo.
The tech giant’s tight grip on the search-ad market is slipping as competitors like Amazon and AI tools lure users and advertisers away.
While Google’s latest woes seem to centre on the DOJ’s antitrust efforts, the search-engine giant may soon face another — perhaps even greater — threat to its moat: losing its dominance in search ads.
In 2023, GoogleGOOGL $197.46 (0.30%) earned over $175 billion (or 57% of Alphabet’s total sales) solely from search advertising, where revenues are generated by people clicking on the sponsored ads displayed alongside search results. However, Google is gradually losing ground in the $300 billion-strong global market for search ads, as both users and advertisers shift to competitors like Amazon and AI tools, The Wall Street Journalreports.
According to data from eMarketer, Google’s share of the search-advertising market is forecast to drop below 50% next year for the first time since tracking began in 2008, with revenue growing at a modest 7.6% year over year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s search-ad revenue surged by 17.6% over the same period.
Indeed, users are increasingly turning to platforms like AmazonAMZN $222.71 (-2.15%) or TikTok for their shopping searches and general queries, according to WSJ. The seemingly inevitable rise of AI is also playing a role: a survey from New Street Research found that nearly 60% of US consumers used a chatbot to help them decide on a purchase in the past 30 days.
This shift means fewer users are clicking on Google’s ads, driving precious ad dollars away from the tech giant and toward its rivals. Advertisers’ spending on search engines like Google grew a modest 3% year over year in Q3… while spending on retail media like Amazon was up 28%, and social-media platforms like MetaMETA $610.88 (-3.07%) were up 5%, per marketing agency Skai’s latest report.
Google is the most popular search engine in the world, but its dominance over search ad revenue—and Gen Z’s vernacular—is losing steam.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google’s share of the $88.8 billion U.S. search advertising market is expected to fall to the lowest point in over a decade as a diverse set of competitors like Amazon, Perplexity AI, and TikTok deliver alternative search experiences.
Consumers are conducting product searches through Amazon and social media searches through TikTok, with targeted ads creating revenue for each business along the way. Perplexity is expected to infuse its AI search results with ads later this month.
Those rival offerings will push Google’s U.S. search ad market share below 50% next year and bring Amazon’s share up to about 25%, per the WSJ.
Moreover, Bernstein Research shows that Gen Z is barely using the term Google as a verb. Young users are “searching” through social media, Amazon, and ChatGPT; they aren’t “Googling,” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote in a September note.
As of last week, Google’s AI Overviews now display ads with relevant products under a “sponsored” banner. According to a Google spokesperson, the ads will only appear under relevant searches.
Example of ads in Google AI overviews. Credit: Google
Even with AI rivals like ChatGPT, Google’s numbers remain strong. Its share of the overall search market has remained at least 90% so far. Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines have less than 4% each of the market.
Google ad revenue also increased from 2022 to 2023, rising from $224.47 billion to $237.86 billion.
Sherin Shibu is a business news reporter at Entrepreneur.com. She previously worked for PCMag, Business Insider, The Messenger, and ZDNET as a reporter and copyeditor. Her areas of coverage encompass tech, business, strategy, finance, and even space. She is a Columbia University graduate.
SearchGPT is already dubbed by some as the “Google killer.”
Arvind Jain, a former Google (GOOGL) engineer and now CEO of the enterprise A.I. search platform Glean, never saw Google’s approximately 90 percent market share in online search as overtly anticompetitive—after all, Google always had a superior search product, Jain said. In recent years, however, innovation seems to have given way to profitability. “The experience was getting worse, especially on mobile devices, where there are just way too many ads on the page,” the former Googler told Observer.
For the first time in many years, competition is ramping up. In July, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, an A.I.-powered search engine that many already dubbed the “Google killer.” Smaller players, such as Perplexity AI, are also gaining momentum in the search space.
“There is more serious competition than ever before,” Ashwini Karandikar, executive vice president of media, technology and data at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, an industry group, told Observer. Karandikar’s prescience is rooted in decades of industry experience, during which she witnessed digital advertising go from just 5 percent of a company’s advertising budget to practically 100 percent.
Technologically, answer engines powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to shake up the search and digital advertising markets, but Jain doesn’t think they’re not yet commercially ready. “Personally, as a user, I don’t feel comfortable going to these answer engines,” he said. That’s because most of them don’t provide the source of information from which they generate answers. Some chatbots are starting to cite sources, but this feature is still in the early stages. Ultimately, competitors will have to lean into a hybridized search solution, said Jain, which will combine plain search and plain answers for an optimized user experience.
That need for transparency has roots in the trust gap highlighted by consumer-facing A.I. products. The A.I. trust gap is “the sum of the persistent risks (both real and perceived) associated with A.I.,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, a business professor at Tufts University, wrote in a recent article for the Harvard Business Review. Common concerns around A.I. include deepfakes, hallucinations, data privacy and A.I.’s inherent black-box problem. Last year, Pew Research found that 52 percent of Americans feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of A.I., with people particularly torn about its application for finding accurate information online.
To establish public trust, companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are all prioritizing self-regulation. These companies are on a steering committee for a truth-seeking organization called C2PA, or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. It’s an “open technical standard providing publishers, creators and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media,” according to the coalition’s website.
Brand recognition will play a major role in trust, something Google simply has more of, said Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner. “People trust results because they see that they’re appearing on a search results page that they are familiar with,” he told Observer. “If you go to Perplexity, for example, as an alternative search engine, it has some powerful capabilities, but it doesn’t have that established brand trust yet that makes you feel confident that the results it’s giving you are unbiased and authentic.”
However, as the competitive landscape in search and digital advertising inevitably evolves, the leading position is not set in stone. Google is currently facing multiple antitrust charges over its dominance in the online search market. “Whatever happens with the trials, we’re definitely looking at a situation where marketers, in particular, are going to have to diversify their approach and do a lot more experimentation and testing of new channels, new techniques, new strategies for search and discovery,” said Frank, adding that this push forward is “mostly because of the impact of generative A.I.”
As new competitors enter the arena, monopoly concerns are not entirely assuaged. OpenAI itself is backed by Bing creator Microsoft. Meanwhile, Google is keeping up with A.I. trends with new products like AI Overviews. It’s possible the competitive waters will just get muddied. Nonetheless, innovation is already responding, and a somewhat consolidated market is good, said Frank. “We don’t want to see the same kind of fragmentation that made digital media so difficult to deal with in the early days,” he said.
Feature Image Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Maximize your marketing budget with effective Google Ads optimization strategies that prioritize performance and protect your brand’s interests.
The Gist
Beware of default settings. Make sure your budget is allocated to high-performing channels like search, not Google Display Network or Search Partners.
Question recommendations.Take Google’s rep suggestions cautiously, as they may prioritize Google’s profits over your brand’s needs.
Optimize what you control. Use advanced strategies like optimizing for revenue and integrating CRM data to guide campaigns toward desired outcomes.
I’ve worked with Google Ads for almost 15 years. When I started working in search engine marketing, Google was a great partner that cared about helping brands succeed.
Those were the good old days.
Today, there are countless stories of reps pushing irrelevant features, formerly helpful reps being laid off in the shift to AI-based “service” and Google Ads campaigns that essentially encourage advertisers to set a budget and leave the rest to Google. Google reps are now prioritizing revenue for Google above all else, brands be damned. (If you don’t believe me, check out Sundar Pichai’s commentary on Google’s Q1 earnings call.)
Now, effective Google Ads optimization is especially crucial to make sure your budget is allocated to high-performing channels.
How to Make Your Marketing Budget Work for You, Not Google
Unless you’re marketing for a huge brand and have a dedicated rep whose main goal is to retain your business, your brand is vulnerable to all this. Here’s a list of recommendations for making sure your advertising budget is working for you — and not just Google’s bottom line.
Check Your Default Settings
Multiple brands have come to us with default settings that allocate the majority of the brand’s budget to Google Display Network and Search Partners, with nothing going to search — which is an exponentially higher-performing channel. Last month, we did an audit for a brand that had just spent many thousands of dollars on the GDN and Search Partners, with zero conversions to show for it.
Take Every Recommendation You Hear From a Rep With a Grain of Salt
Remember that their goal now is to make money for Google’s shareholders, not your brand. Even if it’s a cool-sounding beta that might offer early adoption advantages, think critically about whether it’s the right strategic move for your brand before signing up. Prioritize strategies that support your Google Ads optimization goals.
Make Sure You’re Controlling What You Can Control in Your Campaigns
Let’s say you’re an ecommerce brand that has to use PerformanceMax campaigns, and you’re telling the campaigns to optimize for conversion goals. If you leave the rest to Google, they’ll optimize for the easiest conversions, which will probably be your lowest-cost products.
You can mitigate this by optimizing for revenue and using target return on advertising spend (ROAS). For B2B brands, instead of focusing on leads, make sure that you are segmenting and integrating your back-end CRM data as offline conversions to tell Google what kind of customers to look for — specifically, the customers who buy the kinds of products or services you want to sell.
If You Have a Helpful Rep, Do Your Best to Keep Them
If you don’t, ask for a new one. Eventually AI “support” will probably be your only option, but if you don’t speak up before that happens, you’ll be stuck with whatever Google gives you.
When in Doubt, Ask an Expert to Check Your Campaigns to See if There Are any Red Flags
This could be an agency or a consultant if you don’t have anyone in house, but the right party will justify your investment several times over.
Enhancing Your Google Ads Optimization for Better Results
It’s helpful to learn as much as you can about Google Ads and to keep up with its releases and their effectiveness.
Overall, make sure there’s someone on your team who can recognize and call BS, and keep your accounts optimized for your growth, not Google’s. A solid approach to Google Ads optimization will help you counterbalance any external pressures.
Tyler Jordan is CEO of Jordan Digital Marketing. Tyler founded Jordan Digital Marketing (JDM) in July 2017 after extensive stints working on both sides of the agency-client relationship.
Google’s programmable search engine is easy to set up and a great way to get the custom search results you want faster and without clutter. Google first introduced this feature in 2006, and it’s underused and underappreciated, but everyone should use this handy search tool.
What Is Google’s Programmable Search Engine?
Most of the time, a normal Google search provides some good sources. Unfortunately, ads, sponsored links, irrelevant results, clickbait sites, YouTube videos, social media posts, and other unhelpful content often clutter the results. Google’s Programmable Search Engine solves this problem. Best of all, you don’t need any real technical knowledge. If you can copy and paste links, you can make a custom search engine.
How to Create a Custom Programmable Search Engine
As said, creating a custom programmable search engine is really simple with Google’s free tool.
Create and Name Your Search Engine
First, head to Programmable Search Engine and ensure you are logged in with your Google Account. Select Get Started, click Add in the control panel, and name your search engine.
Enter the Websites You Want to Search
Now, fill out the What to search box. It will give you examples of how to enter the websites you’d like to include. For example, entering www.makeuseof.com/* will include the entire makeuseof.com website, and entering *.bbc.co.uk will search the entire BBC domain, including television, radio, news, etc. You can add as many sites as you like here and always add more or remove some later.
Next, fill in your search settings. There are just two boxes here. Turn Image Search on if you want to include images in your search, and turn Safe Search on if you want it to block adult content from your searches.
Now, confirm that you are not a robot and click Create; your search engine is ready. There is a small code snippet on this page, but you only need it if you want to add it to your website.
Bookmark Your Custom Search Engine
Click Back to all engines in the top left of the page. Here, you will see a link to your search engine and any others you’ve created. Click the search engine’s name to edit, add or remove sites, or change settings.
Click on the link symbol under Public URL to open your search engine in a new window. You can bookmark this page to use your new search engine whenever needed—press CTRL + D on Google Chrome to bookmark the current page.
Programmable search engines can be a great way to get higher quality Google search results faster and with less combing through ads and bad results. They narrow your news search to trusted sites, focus work searches on industry publications, restrict study searches to professor-approved sources, create one for job searching, one for shopping to search only retailers you know and trust, or help you make sure kids search only kid-friendly, educational sites.
Because custom programmable search engines are so fast and easy to create, you can even make one to speed you through a particular project faster and delete it when finished. Experiment and get your search the way you want, without all the clutter.
Google faces a second antitrust trial in less than a year.
Just one month after Google (GOOGL) lost an antitrust trial over its monopoly in the online search market, the tech giant is facing a second major competition case surrounding its search dominance. A trial starting this week (Sept. 9) will see Judge Leonie Brinkema, a federal judge in Virginia, determine whether the company is illegally monopolizing the digital advertising industry.
Google is no stranger to antitrust scrutiny—in August, another federal judge ruled it had built up an unfair position in the online search market. The company has previously faced a bevy of antitrust probes over issues like its app store operations and the Android mobile operating system.
This time, Google is being investigated for its outsized position in digital advertising. The ongoing trial stems from a federal antitrust suit last year that claimed the company unfairly controlled both the supply and demand of online advertising through its monopoly of the “ad tech stack” used by digital publishers and advertisers—in part as a result of its acquisitions of other ad tech companies.
Losing the case could see Google’s ad tech business broken up, which would lead to wide-ranging ramifications across the tech and ad market. Google has been a major player in online advertising for decades. Its advertising revenue reached over $200 billion last year, accounting for more than two-thirds of the company’s total revenue.
Here’s a look at the timeline of events leading up to Google’s ad tech case:
2008: Google acquires DoubleClick
Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, a publisher ad server, constitutes one of the most significant aspects of the ongoing antitrust trial. The $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2008 “vaulted Google into a commanding position over the tools publishers use to sell advertising opportunities” and “set the stage for Google’s later exclusionary conduct across the ad tech industry,” according to the antitrust suit filed more than a decade later. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated Google’s acquisition at the time and ultimately allowed the tech company to proceed with its purchase.
2009-2011: Ad tech purchases proliferate
Google didn’t stop at DoubleClick. It built an ad tech empire over the following years, making a series of acquisitions to bolster its intermediary position between advertisers and publishers. In 2009, it purchased AdMob, a system allowing publishers of mobile apps to sell ads, for $750 million. The following year, it took over Invite Media, a bidding exchange for display advertising, for $81 million. And in 2011, Google bought the yield manager AdMeld for $400 million.
2016: Google begins combining user data
At the time of Google’s 2008 DoubleClick acquisition, its privacy policies prevented Google from combining user data from external websites with those from Google properties. This changed in 2016, according to the antitrust suit. Google allegedly amended its policy and began combining user data, a decision that helped it target advertising to users “in ways no one else in the industry could absent the acquisition of monopoly—or at least dominant—positions in adjacent markets such as Search,” according to the suit.
2023: The Justice Department files an antitrust action
In January 2023, Google’s ad tech dominance finally came to a head. The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states filed an antitrust suit in a federal district court in Virginia, accusing Google of unfairly dominating the online advertising market. Through its “longstanding monopolies in digital advertising technologies,” the company, on average, pockets more than 30 percent of ad dollars from its various ad tech products, according to the suit.
2024: Google fights for a bench trial
The government initially intended for its antitrust lawsuit to be heard by a jury this fall, as the suit included a damages claim. In July, Google managed to avoid a jury trial by handing over a $2.3 million check covering requested damages and interest, therefore ensuring the case would be heard by a judge instead. The case, which started this week, is expected to run for several weeks.
To be honest, the Google Search ranking volatility has not cooled at all since the pre-launch of the Google August 2024 core update. But something happened yesterday which caused a bit more of a swing of things in the rankings at Google Search. It is like we have had a constant Google Search ranking update for the past month or so – and no, this is not the longest volatility period from Google yet (although we may hit it).
We saw big signals on and around September 6th, September 10th or so and maybe around September 14th. And now I am September 18th.
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing – just look at how the volatility really has not calmed in most of these tools. Some of the tools are calmer but still show spikes around these dates. I wonder what is going on at Google, and I suspect Google wonders as well. 🙂
I cannot just go by these tools because most of them have just been showing volatility for the past month or so. The chatter within the SEO industry is a good tool for me to see bigger swings on specific days. So I think we had another big swing yesterday, September 18th.
Here is what I am hearing from WebmasterWorld and here in the past 24-hours or so.
HUGE drop today…
Same here.. HUGE drop today! 🙁
I’m really sorry to write this because I wish it were the case for all of you. Google suddenly seems to have taken a liking to my news site. I already mentioned that I had a very good weekend, but it goes even further than that. Since then, I’ve had roughly the same high number of readers that Google sends me every day (357% more than during the week), mainly via Discover. Sistrix also shows me that the value of visibility continues to rise (quadrupling since Friday). I would like to understand where this is coming from all of a sudden, but since I haven’t changed anything on the site, I don’t see any reason.
Slight recovery past 2 days. Keyword counts per Ahrefs also reversed and appear to be going up again. Too early to tell if its a real trend.
Same for me, the period from after labour day until now has been extremely high traffic. But it is slowly tapering off. I am seeing loses in top 3 and top 10 terms again and also my USA traffic is reverting to the old lower level day by day. Customer inquiries are also slowing down again. Non-USA traffic is still sky high though
A drop seems like it might have started yesterday at around noon…my traffic dropped like a stone and stayed down rest of the day. Today USA traffic is -40% at 11am, which has broken the pattern of being up every day since Sept. 3rd or so.
Oh … 75% of my Googleday gone and already at 167% v the month so far !
I, too, have a nice increase in traffic today, but that is not reflected in my revenue…yet.
Yes, today’s data. Yesterday was less notable. However, after 4pm, everything went back to normal. It seemed like a filter was turned on, then off…
Does anyone notice drop in impressions today, any upcoming update?
And, shockingly, one of the trends involves (over)using AI.
The Gist
Tab concerns. Apple and Yahoo’s tab additions may alter email visibility and engagement, impacting marketers’ strategies and consumer interaction.
AI previews.Automated summaries threaten email marketing efforts, undermining carefully crafted preview text and brand messaging.
Diluted branding.AI-generated summaries may push content below the fold, weakening brand voice and potentially introducing inaccuracies.
Marketers have reasons to be concerned by the upcoming inbox changes that were announced by Apple on June 10 and Yahoo on June 11. Those changes entail Apple adding tabs to Apple Mail, and both Apple and Yahoo adding AI-generated summaries to emails.
Let’s talk in more detail about each and what the concerns are.
The Addition of Tabs
Ten years after Google pioneered tabs, and many years after Microsoft and Yahoo adopted them, Apple has finally followed suit. Expect to see tabs in future versions of Apple Mail. All of the major inbox providers use slightly different tabs from one another. Apple Mail’s four tabs will be Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions.
Apple’s WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024
You might be wondering why this is a concern. And regular readers of my CMSWire columns may recall I wrote an article marking the 10-year anniversary of Gmail Tabs, where I concluded by saying that the “Promotions tab isn’t worth fussing about.”
So, what’s changed?
Well, in that same article, I talk about how Gmail has been automatically applying Email Annotations to some commercial emails in the Promotions Tab that don’t include that coding. Essentially, Gmail has been hijacking the code of marketers’ emails to achieve its own goals, which presumably includes making their in-line ads less distinguishable from the emails surrounding them.
Google calls it Automatic Extraction. This year, they’ve become much more aggressive in applying it. The higher frequency of use has also made it evident that Automatic Extraction routinely degrades the email experience crafted by brands, creating disconnects between their subject line and the preview content imposed by Gmail. In some cases, legal questions around misrepresentation and false advertising are being raised, with Gmail occasionally pulling discount amounts from disclaimers at the bottom of emails and promoting them in the preview content, falsely asserting that it’s the featured discount in the email.
I have zero concerns about inbox providers creating Promotions tabs. Neither do I mind them using the Promotions tab as a venue to display ads, even placing them in-line among emails. That’s a reasonable way to generate revenue for their inbox business.
However, putting marketers’ emails in a different tab where the preview content of their emails is changed without their consent in ways that they would never do to personal emails is a serious problem. I’m glad to see Apple follow Google’s lead on tabs, but I hope they won’t follow their lead on changing marketers’ email content.
AI-Generated Previews & Summaries
The other big change that’s coming is the addition of generative AI-powered previews and summaries for both Apple and Yahoo.
In the case of Apple, they’ll be replacing preview text of emails with a generative AI-written preview. All of the examples shown were personal, but presumably this will be applied to commercial emails, too. It’s unclear if this functionality will be on by default, or if it can be turned off by users.
Apple’s WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024
And once you’ve opened an email, Apple will give you the option to have generative AI summarize the email with the tap of the Summarize button.
Apple’s WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024
In what Yahoo Mail is calling “one of the most significant updates to its desktop experience in nearly a decade,” they’ve streamlined their user interface and added generative AI previews and summaries. Both appear to be on by default, and it’s unclear if they can be turned off.
The AI preview is similar to Apple’s, which again replaces the typical preview text that’s pulled from the email’s body content. However, unlike Apple’s AI summary, Yahoo’s appears to be done automatically.
The other difference is that Yahoo’s summary appears as a series of bulleted items, rather than a paragraph-style summary. It will also include proposed actions, tasks, or responses needed, according to Yahoo.
Yahoo press release on June 11, 2024
The concern with AI previews is that they undo marketers’ preview text optimization efforts. While it’s true that most personal emails aren’t written by communication experts and therefore have less helpful preview text, that’s not the case with marketing emails.
The concern with AI summaries is similar, especially if they’re applied automatically to marketing emails. While some marketing emails can be long, when that’s the case, it’s almost always because the email is composed of many content blocks about multiple subjects. AI summaries are unlikely to do that justice. Indeed, given how little actual text is in many marketing emails, the summary may largely reword the marketing text, potentially introducing inaccuracies in the process.
Regardless of how good the AI engine summary is, the summary will have two negative effects on marketers:
It will push more of the email’s content below the fold.
It will dilute the brand’s voice and filter its message.
Inconsistent implementations of dark mode, plus other rendering inconsistencies.
A deliverability requirement that brands only send to engaged subscribers, while some inbox providers block senders’ visibility into opens, the most frequent sign of engagement.
Considering all of the helpful advancements that inbox providers could agree on, it’s unfortunate that what they seem to agree on is that preview text should be overwritten and body copy filtered and summarized by AI — particularly, it appears, if the message is commercial. Put another way, it seems the problem they’re trying to solve is that people are writing the emails.
