If you’ve ever searched Google for “air purifier reviews” in English, you probably found the type of content posted on HouseFresh.com.
The website was created in 2020 by Gisele Navarro and her husband, after a decade of experience writing about products that improve indoor air quality.
The couple stocked their basement with purifiers, conducted rigorous science-based testing, and wrote articles to help consumers analyze whether the marketing of these products was over the top.
HouseFresh is one example of what has been a thriving industry of independent publishers producing exactly the kind of original content Google says it wants to promote.
And, in fact, shortly after the website launched, the tech giant began showing HouseFresh among the first pages that appeared after doing a search on the topic.
The page became a thriving business with 15 full-time employees.
Navarro had big plans for the future.
However, in September 2023, Google made a series of updates to the algorithm that operates its search engine.
“It decimated us,” Navarro says. “Suddenly, the search terms that used to show HouseFresh were sending people to big lifestyle magazines that clearly don’t test the products. The articles on those websites are full of information that is incorrect.”
The second Google algorithm update occurred last March and was even harsher. HouseFresh’s thousands of daily visitors dwindled to just hundreds.
“We were absolutely devastated,” Navarro says.
In recent weeks, HouseFresh has had to lay off most of its team.
If nothing changes, he says, the website is doomed to fail.
Only the beginning
A Google spokesperson told the BBC that the company only makes changes to search engines after rigorous testing confirms they will be useful to users.
He also noted that the company provides website owners with help, resources and opportunities for feedback.
Google remains steadfast in its position that the changes will be beneficial for search and that the new algorithm is just the beginning.
Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the company’s annual developer conference one of the most significant moves in the search engine’s history.
In the future, Pichai said, Google will provide its own AI-generated answers to users’ searches, without them having to enter a web page.
The feature is called “AI Summary” and has already been implemented in the US.
“The result is a product that does the work for you,” Pichai said.
“It is generative AI at the scale of human curiosity,” he added.
AI overviews are just one of a series of profound changes Google has implemented to its core product over the past two years.
The company says its recent effort to revamp search will usher in an exciting new technological era and help solve many of the problems plaguing the internet.
Why the changes?
Critics say the opposite may happen.
As Google restructures its algorithms and uses artificial intelligence to transition from a search engine to a search and answer engine, some worry that the result could be nothing less than the extinction of companies that generate content.
One thing is certain: Google’s work is about to have a profound impact on what many of us see when we connect to the internet.
The changes were made because Google recognizes that the internet has a problem. You’ll have seen it yourself, if you’ve ever used a search engine.
The Internet is dominated by a “school” of website building known as “search engine optimization,” or SEO.
The term refers to techniques intended to adjust articles and web pages to achieve better recognition in search engines.
The company even offers SEO tips, tools, and advice for website owners. For millions of businesses that rely on search engine mechanization, SEO may be inevitable.
The problem is that SEO can be abused.
Some website owners realized that sometimes you can make more money by creating content designed to please Google algorithms, rather than humans.
The company’s efforts to address this problem are not always successful. If you’ve ever been frustrated by what appears when you search for something like “Best running shoes for women,” you know the problem.
Often, the results after doing a keyword search are filled with site pages that contain very little useful information, but tons of ads and links to retailers.
What’s often lost is what you’re probably looking for when you open Google: information from people who are knowledgeable and passionate about their topic.
War
Google’s war on spam in search results intensified recently.
In 2022, the company issued a “Useful Content Update” to its algorithm aimed at removing content created solely for the purpose of higher search engine rankings.
It then made a subsequent update in September 2023 and a third adjustment in March this year. The technology giant assures that the result is “45% less non-original and low-quality content.”
“Our recent updates aim to connect people with useful, satisfying and original content from a wide range of sites on the web,” a company spokesperson told the BBC.
“As we work to improve search, we continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to web pages and supporting an open and healthy internet,” he added.
But the updates also had consequences, some surprising.
For example, data from analytics tool SEMrush suggests that New York Magazine’s website lost 32% of its traffic from Google in the past six months, while GQ.com shrank 26%.
The data shows that Urban Dictionary, a popular, crowd-sourced dictionary of English slang, lost about 18 million page views, representing more than half of its online search traffic. Google.
In the same way, the OprahDaily.com portal fell almost 58%.
A New York Magazine spokesperson said these findings were incomplete and did not reflect the company’s internal analysis.
SEMrush is an industry standard tool, its figures are estimates and this data only measures traffic coming from Google.
Representatives for GQ, Oprah Daily and Urban Dictionary did not respond to requests for comment from the BBC.
However, experts and more than half a dozen media executives and website owners told the BBC that the data appears to be too close to reality.
There is a beneficiary
In place of these sites, there is one platform that you will see a lot more of: Reddit.
According to SEMrush, Reddit saw a 126% growth in traffic coming from Google.
The company is already benefiting from this boom.
Reddit just announced its first quarterly earnings since becoming a publicly traded company in March 2024.
Its revenues total US$243 million, a surprising 48% more than the previous year.
“The increase in traffic that Reddit is seeing is unprecedented on the internet,” says Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive, and a celebrity in the world of SEO.
“Cooking content, adult content, video games, gardening, fashion, it’s all just Reddit.”
This company, however, refused to comment to the BBC.
But Reddit isn’t the only winner after Google’s recent algorithm updates.
SEMrush data shows that other user-generated sites like Quora and Instagram experienced very similar astronomical increases. There were also impressive spikes in LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
In a way, Google was following a trend.
In recent years, a large number of internet users began adding the word “Reddit” to the end of their searches.
They hoped that people would share their honest opinions on the platform, unlike websites that tried to game Google’s system.
This is confirmed by Google’s liaison with the public, Danny Sullivan.
“We’ve found that people often want to learn from the experiences of others, so we display content from hundreds of forums and other communities on the web,” he said.
“Our agreement with Reddit did not include ranking their content higher at all,” he said.
But Google results are a game of give and take. If the search engine sends traffic to one site, it is because it receives it from another.
The effects on the losers in this equation are dramatic.
“Google is simply waging war on editorial content websites,” Ray says.
“It’s almost as if he had designed an algorithm to attack small bloggers,” he says.
The greatest offense
The biggest offense, according to the content creators and media executives we interviewed, are the AI-generated responses.
Google maintains that its AI summaries in search results will be a boon for websites.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, wrote in a post that they actually increase the traffic the platform sends to websites.
“AI overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared in a traditional listing for that query,” he wrote.
“As we expand this experience, we will continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and content creators.”
However, the company has not shared any of the data supporting that claim, and many website owners and industry experts fear that the opposite is true.
Katie Berry, owner of the cleaning advice website Housewife How-Tos, assumes that users simply won’t search for more information if Google’s AI answers their questions.
AI search results “answer questions superficially” ial and often incorrectly, so people don’t visit my page,” he says.
According to Berry, his page traffic dropped 70% after Google’s 2022 update and dropped even further after Google began testing its new AI.
Others, like travel writer David Leiter, say Google’s AI is openly stealing their content.
The content creator says that a search for “Best slot canyons near Las Vegas” used to bring up an article on his World Travel Guy website.
However, earlier this week he did a search that returned an AI-generated answer at the top of the page.
“Google replaced my article with a giant box that had an overview made by AI, and it returned an answer that is incorrect,” Leiter said.
“The first four places you list aren’t even slot canyons. A slot cannon is a specific type of cannon with a narrow passageway, but the AI doesn’t understand that,” he commented.
The AI overview included a link to Leiter’s article, but only if the person took the time to click a small arrow at the bottom of the result.
Leiter says Google’s recent algorithm updates took away 95% of its traffic.
Meanwhile, Google recognizes that artificial intelligence tools can provide inaccurate information, but ensures that it is constantly working to improve results.
In the court
Media executives aren’t the only ones questioning Google’s control of the Internet.
The company is simultaneously fighting numerous antitrust lawsuits, which target different parts of its business.
He is currently awaiting a decision on a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice that accuses him of running an illegal monopoly in the search engine industry.
If the tech giant loses the case, sanctions could range from massive fines to forced dissolution of the company.
Google, which controls more than 90% of the global search business, maintains that its success is due solely to the fact that it makes superior products.
One of its spokespersons indicated that the company faces “immense competition” and that people have many options for searching for information online.
“I understand that Google doesn’t owe traffic to us or anyone else,” says HouseFresh’s Navarro.
“But Google controls the roads. If tomorrow they decide that roads will not reach an entire city, that city will die. He has too much power. You can’t just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Oh, well, it’s just the free market,’” he opines.
“Maybe it was naïve to think that we could be successful simply by creating great quality, original content that people want to read.”
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