Google loses antitrust case, AIO drops and more: News SEO catch up

We’re covering recent changes at Google, including the antitrust ruling, tool updates, the drop in AI Overviews and rumours of a core update. Here's what publishers need to know.

Aug 12, 2024

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back with a collab issue! Jessie is back from a restful weekend at the cottage which included s'mores, swimming and some time reading on the lake. Meanwhile, Shelby is extremely grateful the Olympics have come to an end. Somehow, I did not win the gold medal for most consecutive days forgetting to eat lunch. What an outrage!

This week: We’re taking a look at the state of Google. A lot has happened in recent months, from the recent ruling of Google’s antitrust lawsuit to tooling updates to the decline of AI Overviews, as well as rumblings of a core update to come. We go through each of these updates and dissect what publishers need to know.

This setup is far too calm and organized to belong to a news SEO editor. But, it is nice to dream. Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

In this issue:

Google’s antitrust lawsuit ruling
What is happening with AI and search
Updates to Trends and Search Console
A core algorithm looms as volatility heightens in search

Refer a friend

U.S. judge rules Google has an illegal monopoly on search

A U.S. federal judge ruled last week that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search by paying companies billions to use its search engine as the default on their products.

Google paid billions to companies like Apple and Samsung each year — including $26 billion in 2021 — to maintain its supremacy. The result is blocking out would-be competitors like Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo from competing in the market. In addition, because the company controls ads on search, Google influences (and inflates) the price of promotion. (Google currently owns around 90 per cent of the market share.)

What the court said: “The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his ruling in the case, which was first filed in 2020 under the Donald Trump administration.

What Google said: Google denied it is an illegal monopoly, and that it behaved anti-competitively. “Google is winning because it’s better,” the company argued. It also asserted that the rise of TikTok and AI — along with the rapid evolution of the internet — meant it did not have a monopoly.

"This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available," the company said in a statement.

Google said it will appeal the decision, an ordeal that is likely to take several years of legal proceedings.

What it means: The ruling has the potential to change how giant companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta operate as it sets a precedent for future antitrust cases. It’s the first major antitrust ruling against a tech company since a decision against Microsoft in 2000, when it settled with the Justice Department over claims it forced its Internet Explorer browser on Windows users.

Next, there will be a second proceeding to determine potential fixes, which could include breaking up Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The ruling also makes way for further prosecution of Big Tech in the U.S.

What it means for publishers: It’s too early to provide a meaningful prediction. This decision was not about remedies for Google. It’s possible it could lead to other opportunities in the search ecosystem (if another company has the chance to really compete with Google), but that is far in the future.

This is the first in a series of tech monopoly cases brought forward by the U.S. government in recent years. The outcome could reshape how we reach and connect with audiences.

AI and search: Where we are at

Remember when we were all talking about — and worrying about — Google’s AI Overviews? Well, fear not! As it turns out, the hype was for nothing.

Barry Adams predicted back in May that the hype for AI was going to be a “storm in a teacup,” and that’s what seems to be the case. AI Overviews is a relatively uncommon feature — in fact, AIO features only show for around 7 per cent of queries, a new low as of July, according to data from BrightEdge.

AI-generated answers started declining back in mid-April, when the number of Google Search results without SGE jumped to 65 per cent from 25 per cent. After Google officially launched the feature, AIO only showed for 15 per cent of queries. Now, it’s at an all-time low.

AIO looks to be just another feature from Google that publishers will see, but won’t result in significant negative declines. Audience editors, rejoice!

Also, according to a new report by Datos, which was analyzed by Sonata Insights and Sparktoro, AI search engines (like ChatGPT or Gemini) have not disrupted Google’s search traffic share. In fact, its traffic grew year-over-year by 1.4 per cent on desktop. (Google also reported not having lost any traffic share to Microsoft Bing in April, despite rumours that they were declining in certain markets.)

The largest competitor in the AI search engine space is Perplexity, which experienced 42 per cent growth from the 2023 to 2024. But the actual share of overall traffic is negligible. Google had “more than 290x the number of search users as Perplexity in May,” according to Sparktoro’s Rand Fishkin.

Two major takeaways from Rand’s analysis:

Between May 2023 and May 2024, Google’s share of combined desktop and mobile web traffic remained stable, as did the percentage of people using search. “Even though some AI platforms are getting engagement, they’re not taking search share away from Google; if anything, it’s additive.”
AI platform users stop with old methods: 99 per cent continued to use traditional search engines.

However, AI has not gone away. As expected, AI’s impact on our day-to-day tasks has been felt.

More people are using AI tools like ChatGPT to help with menial tasks, but as The Rebooting Show discussed recently with Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, this isn’t the way to win in the AI world. SEO tasks like tagging, inserting links to related articles, testing headlines should be combined with AI tools to make the process more intuitive.

"People probably overestimate the amount of things that AI is going to help them automate, of what they do today. They underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do [it].” His advice? Be remarkable. In news speak: Create the best journalism for the reader that you can.

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Google makes updates to Trends and Search Console

Google Trends

Google Trends got a facelift last week with the rollout of a new Trending Now page.

What’s new: The new page includes when a keyword started trending, along with the search volume. The detailed view includes a trend breakdown, which includes a chart and related queries. Google also removed the ability to filter by category.

The updated Trending Now page includes new filtering options, new countries and better sub-region coverage.

Filtering now includes the country, timeframe, Trend status (if a keyword is still trending) and a dropdown for sorting (alphabetically or by search volume, recency or relevance). Trend status is a particularly useful addition: Now, editors can filter out terms that are no longer trending to see when interest has dwindled.

Why it matters: These are useful tweaks to Google Trends as it makes the initial sleuthing to see whether a trend is still of interest to readers a bit easier. Improved filtering can enable editors to dial in on questions and queries that will be of the most interest to their audience.

Google Search Console

What it is: Google also recently launched a recommendations feature in Search Console. The experimental feature is only available to some users for now and is available in the “Overview” tab.

What Google said: The company said the new feature “provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search.”

“The data was already available to you on Search Console, but now we're helping to make it more accessible by providing direct recommendations,” the company said.

The new Recommendations section of Google Search Console. Screenshot courtesy Google.

Why it matters: The feature is meant to help users more easily make use of Search Console data. The recommendations include things like adding structured data to pages or reviewing the performance of a certain keyword. This is work audience editors are already doing — but now, it’s being reinforced by Google.

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Google algorithm watch update: Lots of thunder, but no storm (yet)

In recent weeks, there have been significant indications that something is rumbling in Google search, but nothing has been announced by the company itself.

Google said in mid-July that the next Google core update may be released “in the coming weeks,” but did not confirm a date. The company then reiterated on July 29 that a core update “isn’t extremely far away now.” Volatility began to amp up on Google shortly after the initial comment, including a lot of unconfirmed reports of an update.

It does seem like a core update is imminent. SEMRush’s Sensor and AccuRanker’s “Google Grump” rating, which monitor the volatility in SERPs that can indicate algorithm updates, both report a high level of movement. That volatility picks up around July 18-22 and affects most categories. The past few days in particular have the most movement.

SEMRush's sensor indicates on Desktop that there is very high volatility as of August 11.

The last major core update was the March 2024 core update, which started on March 5 and took 45 days to roll out, ending on April 19. This was a major update that targeted the rise of unhelpful content on SERPs, incorporating the helpful content system into its overall core ranking system. This means Google will no longer announce individual helpful content updates, but rather have it as part of the larger core update. It’s possible Google is going to implement some change to the system to combat the rise in UGC content that is unhelpful to users (but remember: Google recently made a $60-million deal with Reddit to use its content to train its LLMs).

The only other update we’ve experienced since March was the June 2024 spam update — which took 7 days to roll out — and the launch of AI Overviews in May 2024.

What can publishers do while we wait?: Algorithm-based declines are often due to site-wide issues. Keep up with your 10x content, ensure the user experience of your whole site is high and review your content for anything low-quality. Proactively remove pages that won’t pass scrutiny in the next update.

In the meantime, communicate to the appropriate stakeholders that an algorithm update is coming soon. Letting them know ahead of time will help, especially if the algorithm affects a publisher negatively.

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