Twenty-five years ago, search transformed the digital world. 

At its inception, Google was a fledgling company that revolutionized the Internet with its search engine. It built and expanded its empire thanks, in part, to the ruling in the antitrust case against Microsoft. The tables have turned today, and Google is on the other side of the bench.  

In early August, Google’s loss in the search antitrust case decision marks a landmark moment for the search industry. As it stands, Google forces user searches to be funneled to its search results page, squashing innovation and extracting tens of billions from search advertisers and publishers in the process. 

The industry now awaits proposed remedies to bring competition to the search market. The door is finally open for browsers and other search properties to innovate and improve the consumer search experience in search advertising by shaping consumer intent.

The Rise of a Tech Giant

In 1998, Larry Page and his Stanford friends invented a brilliant search engine that allowed anyone with a web browser to access relevant results to any query instantly and for free. Google now dominates search and most of Big Tech. 

At the time, the company’s algorithms were so much better than competing search engines that the word “Google” became a verb that was, and still is, synonymous with “search.” 

As Google grew, went public, and eventually added free software like Gmail, Maps, and Chrome, it extended its digital advertising empire. At the time, the only losers seemed to be the news and editorial publications who traded analog ad dollars for digital pennies when they raced to give away content for traffic. 

However, to grow search ad revenue, Google began locking out competitors, raising ad rates, and extracting value from the user experience. As it extended its monopoly into new markets over the last ten years, Google’s search revenue has grown fivefold. 

Unlocking Innovation on the Open Web

Google’s stronghold on the search advertising market is largely due to its exclusive search distribution contracts, which force partnerships like Apple to outsource search experiences to Google, making it the default search engine.

Conversely, “Search on the Open Web” is when a person searches for relevant results outside the search engine, such as on the homepage of a privacy browser like Firefox or through a shopping app like Klarna. In 2023, the size of the Open Web search advertising market was $90-100 billion. Over 90% of that revenue went to Google, according to evidence revealed in the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C. determined that Google’s exclusivity prevents the largest Open Web search properties from controlling ad selection or experimenting with their results. The tech conglomerate is also guilty of removing search results and ads provided by Google. 

Now that Google has been found liable, the door to competition, innovation, and experimentation has opened. Most importantly, the consumer will benefit because the industry is entering a new era of curated search results. 

How Can the Consumer Benefit?

Search on the Open Web opens the door to innovative, generative AI solutions. When Open Web search properties compete to experiment with search, consumers benefit from a more modern, personalized, relevant, and dynamic experience. With a curated search experience, users can find the best result or offer from the browser or property they are searching on and skip the SERP altogether.

Google’s exclusivity contracts currently prohibit this innovation. As a result, Open Web search properties generate less than 10% of total Open Web search revenue. Today, few Open Web search properties can refuse to forgo Google ad revenue altogether — but that is poised to change. 

What’s at Stake for Advertisers and Publishers?

The Court is poised to require Google to compete in search to create incentives for open Web search properties to innovate the search experience. Breaking Google’s exclusivity would bring transparency and efficiency to advertisers, as publishers could show their search results or ads or curate those from direct sources.

Whether it’s privacy search or Generative AI, everyone from DuckDuckGo to Apple Safari to your favorite shopping app could show Google and their own search results and make revenue from their search media.

For advertisers, tens of billions of dollars in wasted ad spend is at stake – as well as the return of transparency and control over their budgets. With Google’s exclusivity deals prohibited, these advertisers can “go direct,” reducing costs and gaining transparency.

The Future of Search Will Be Curated and Driven by Consumer Intent

Search on the Open Web will more effectively serve the needs of consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented and modernized search journey.

The Court’s decision suggests that it will fashion the remedy most likely to create competition in the search results and ad markets, similar to the Microsoft remedy in the early 2000s.

A potential structural remedy, such as the divestiture of Chrome and Android, would incentivize Google to participate in search markets where competitors produce innovative user search experiences and deliver transparency and efficiency to advertisers.

However, the remedy phase plays out, and one thing remains certain: the future of search will be built around valuable moments of consumer intent that can open up the market for $500 billion in consumer spending.

The post Back to the Future of Search: Google’s Loss In The Search Antitrust Trial Unlocks Innovation appeared first on AdMonsters.

Is Google Search broken? Definitely not, and that’s the wrong question to ask.

Two weeks ago, a beleaguered product review site, HouseFresh, dropped an update about their battle, and frustration with Google Search and the state of SEO competition overall. Similarly, SEO experts like Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe have been documenting the rollercoaster of the latest algorithm updates that have walloped publishers across the board.

We are all used to competition and tough days, but it is impossible to prepare for the agony of a foundational shift. The speed of change is accelerating, so it may be helpful to climb a bit higher on the mountain and gain some perspective. Here are my takeaways:

1. Don’t hate the player, hate the game 
2. Unless the player is Google (They’re playing a different game) 
3. Play a different game

And that’s the hardest part. Everything that publishers have held holy about traffic is suddenly upside down. The traffic walls are closing in, and few exit routes are available.

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

For most of us, the rules of the traffic game are set by the search and social platform giants. We spent countless hours obsessing over the Facebook and Google Search “guidelines” to find exploitable advantages. When the preferences of these benefactors shifted whimsically, publishers were quick to adapt, pivot, or die.

Publishers learned early that building empires on borrowed traffic was risky, but compared to social media’s turbulence, Google felt like a predictable bedfellow. Conquering search was hard but meaningful. It was an artful dance of scaling quality content, or at least being of enough quality to win a coveted first position on a search results page. It was one of the few areas in digital publishing where your “library” held a residual value.

We live in a relatively free capitalistic society, and as such, anyone is allowed to enter the ring and play the game. Kudos to my publisher comrades for finding that angle, that wedge, that thing that made your scale possible. Perhaps we were jealous of those gains, but we were never mad at you for doing them.

As Brian Morrissey so eloquently put it, everything in media is a “racket.”  The pursuit of traffic is a hustle, and the monetization of that traffic is a racket. It’s survival of the fittest, but fitness is subjective to the rules of the game.

Desperate for success and strong on the scent of promised pageviews, publishers doubled down on perilous traffic games. Some flourished in influencer videos, native articles, social games, or long-tail SEO. Some ended in a bang, but many are bleeding out from a thousand paper cuts. Yet, scores of publishers find a way to carry on.

This publisher resiliency, however, comes at the price of polluting our resources. The distribution platforms (search, social, reader apps) are curators of content, responsible for delivering its customers an experience far from the garbage of the web. But we can’t have nice things, and we tilted these platforms beyond their intended capabilities. So did we break Google Search? Not really, but kinda.

The Pandemic broke Google Search. The recent SEO content explosion and resulting chaos were a perfect storm that Google wasn’t ready for. The surge in online shopping meant the world needed a gazillion more “best of” articles, and every gadget needed a review. Simultaneously, scaled SEO tools were being democratized, enabling just about anyone to find the right topics and keywords for expansion or attacking competitors. Throw in some zero-interest financing, AI-powered content generation, SEO-threadbois and a social-traffic squeeze, and you get an unmitigated overgrowth of…crap.

Google Is Playing a Different Game

The Tsunami of Crap, however, is part of a much larger weather pattern known as “the Enshittification.” By that logic, Google’s prerogative to dominate the ads business may summon its demise. The internet’s recent pivot to SEO ushered in hundreds of high-powered competitors of varying quality to the SERP battles. Content volume was metastasizing at unfathomable rates, and it was harming the utility of Google’s search results. Searchers resorted to manually adding “in Reddit” to queries or leaving Google entirely and using non-Google AI chatbots. I don’t think Google panics very often, but I’m pretty sure someone said, “I think we have a problem.”

In typical fashion, the Google Search team rolled out a steady barrage of ranking algorithm updates. They prioritized Reddit and Quora posts and other pre-filtered sources like Instagram and Twitter. Google launched Search Generative Experience(SGE) to stem the tide and flex some anti-competitive muscles. In their latest rounds of updates, Google handed out the dreaded manual action to publishers, a certain death knell for most.

Unphased, Google marches forward, as if this were all part of the plan. Amidst the chaos, the revenue teams were busy carving up the SERP page. Ads, SGE, and more ads.

Google is playing a fundamentally different game than everyone else in Search. Without a doubt, Google’s top prize is its “Google Ads” products. They are optimizing for their outcomes, which explicitly do not include sending traffic to publishers.

If you think that Google is optimizing for making revenue on your GAM account, think again. In 2023, Google pulled in 56.9% of its ad revenue ($175 BILLION) from “Google Search & Other,” and only 10.2% of revenue ($31 billion) from the Network.

They gained $12.6 billion in Search revenue YoY, and only lost $1.5 billion in the Google Network. Google footnotes that the “The overall growth [in Search & other revenue] was driven by interrelated factors including increases in search queries resulting from growth in user adoption and usage on mobile devices; growth in advertiser spending; and improvements we have made in ad formats and delivery.” (emphasis mine)

Got that last part? You’re not going crazy. Total search queries are up, traffic to publishers is down, and Search revenue is up. Google is here for the ads, their own ads.

Google Ad’s job is to sell products and take credit for it. Google will fight relentlessly to disintermediate anything that stands between a user and the product Google is promoting on behalf of a paying client. Generative AI searches will do this very well, as the service will synthesize myriad sources (including Reddit) to return a sourceless result and a well-placed carousel of ads. Raptive posits that SGE will cost creators  $2B in revenue,  and others predict traffic losses of 10%-25% and higher by 2026. 

In a recent interview on Bloomberg Originals, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discusses the shift in search and answers if Google Search is broken. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t think it’s broken but he does acknowledge that the AI boom created a glut of content and it’s Google’s responsibility to provide users with a quality experience.

Play a Different Game

It’s not about digital web publishers. Consumers are Google’s customers, and advertisers are their clients – everyone else is just expendable. HouseFresh is right about many things, especially that “Google doesn’t owe HouseFresh traffic.” Despite all that publishers, content creators and the general public have given to Google (ahem, structured data), Google doesn’t owe any of us anything.

A media company’s mission is to create and monetize their intellectual property. Under that lens, there is so much possibility, but it all starts with good IP and a plan. Endurance comes from adaptability. And that’s the hardest part.

It’s not easy to just uproot your business and find a new game to play, let alone be successful at it. Not everyone can be a direct traffic destination, and not everyone has the momentum to upstart a newsletter business. Sure, there are successful media companies that found a different game at their inception, but it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone can find a new niche.

I am truly empathetic for brands that will not survive, and I know that journalism, fair democracy, and so much more are at stake here. The internet is forever, but how it works will always change. But humans crave information and diversion, and thus media will endure.

As creators, we must always look forward and anticipate change. Make unforeseen pivots a planned part of the business plan. We must make investments based on their future return value, not based on justifying the sunk costs of our past. Let it go.

It’s time to take a long look out on the horizon and start to chart your new course. It’s out there for us, but we must work hard to find it. Godspeed to all.

The post Surviving the SEO Shake-Up: Publishers vs. Google’s New Game appeared first on AdMonsters.

Users like going to sites with quick-loading content and snappy responses to their clicks; page performance is a crucial element of good UX, and strong user experience helps build repeat visits and longer page sessions.

But with Google’s end-of-May announcement that they will be using Google Pagespeed Insights metrics as a major part of search engine rankings a few months from now, publishers are suddenly scrutinizing page performance—and worried about how ads affect their metrics.

Pagespeed Insights reports on a wide range of page performance data, but Google is most concerned about three metrics that make up its “Core Web Vitals:”

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how long it takes for the user to see the biggest chunk of content on the page. Think of this as a measurement of page loading speed.
• FIP (First Input Delay) measures the time it takes for a user’s interaction – a click on a link or button, an attempt to fill out a form – to register. Good FIP means a site that feels responsive when you try to interact with it; sites with bad FIP feel laggy.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures whether the visible part of the page moves around while the page is loading. Moving elements are bad, both because they make the page to use while it’s loading, and because of the potential for misclicks.

Poorly-implemented website ad tech can cause problems with all three of these metrics, but even when well-done, adtech can impact LCP and CLS.

Historically, many publishers have chosen to load ads as quickly as possible, aiming to maximize revenue by getting ads in place before the user clicks elsewhere; however, this strategy can backfire by increasing LCP. Why? It’s simple: if the browser is taking time to run header bidding auctions or talk to an ad server, then some of the resources it has are “distracted” with this effort, so it has fewer resources to devote to loading content.

The result? Your content loads a little later, and your LCP goes up. Well-engineered code helps, but there is nevertheless a fundamental conflict between loading ads early and loading content early.

CLS, meanwhile, will get triggered any time you embed ads directly in your page. “Sticky” ads that float above the page aren’t a problem, because they don’t move your content around when they load. But embedded ads push content down when they appear, and that’s exactly what Google does not like.

So how do you solve these problems?

At Playwire, we have taken two approaches which you can mimic as well. First, we offer our publishers the option to use delayed ad loading, in order to eliminate LCP problems. Working in conjunction with one of our customers, we researched and experimented with the LCP measurement.

We found that if ad-loading scripts did not execute immediately, but instead waited a couple of seconds after the “DOMContentLoaded” to run, then the LCP hit from ads could be entirely eliminated. So now this is a standard option we give our publishers: a one-liner they can put in if they are willing to trade ad speed for content speed.

Second, all of our embedded ads now have a visible placeholder in the page before the ad loads. When the ad is ready, it replaces the placeholder. The result? No shifting of content, no CLS hit.

If you haven’t yet reviewed your site’s Core Web Vitals, check them out now. Are your LCP and CLS in the green? If they aren’t, your search engine results will be in jeopardy as you enter 2021—and your ad tech could be to blame.

The post Dear Publisher, Your Site Needs An Ad Tech Health Check appeared first on AdMonsters.