Google is getting worse – or at least, that’s what “we” say.
The common complaint:
Search is dying, SEO is trash, and Google is nearly unusable.
X, LinkedIn, and Reddit are awash with complaints about deteriorating search quality.
The contradicting reality:
Search remains the dominant channel for web traffic.
Google still holds 90% of the search market, grew 20% year over year, and processes 5 trillion searches annually.
If it were truly broken, wouldn’t we have left by now?
The complex truth:
Poet John Keats described “negative capability” as the ability to hold conflicting ideas without demanding a simple answer.
That’s where we are with Google: it may be improving in many ways while simultaneously feeling worse.
The truth resists easy categorization.
This article:
Google wants to maximize profits. That means keeping us on its cash cow, search, and clicking on ads.
Simple, right?
Not quite. The deeper you go, the more complex the incentives become.
To keep the machine running, Google has to:
Every tweak to Search sets off a chain reaction across these groups, often creating tension or imbalance.
Google makes more money by showing more ads, but that comes at the cost of user satisfaction.
Ironically, the happier users are, the less Google earns compared to when users are just slightly less happy.
Quality is a soft, slippery metric – hard to define and even harder to measure.
Ask five people and you’ll get five definitions.
When we talk about search quality, we mean this:
That’s a solid proxy for user-centered quality, but it may not match Google’s priorities.
To stay dominant and profitable, Google has to juggle the expectations of all its stakeholders.
From its perspective, search quality improves if usage grows and revenue rises.
As the market leader, Google has always operated under pressure, but in the last 2–3 years, that pressure has intensified.
Here are five external forces that have increasingly constrained Google’s strategy.
Amazon has carved out a major share of high-value commercial queries.
In response, Google:
Social platforms have evolved into informal search engines, especially among younger users.
Google is adapting by integrating more social-style features into search:
Despite pioneering transformer tech, Google hesitated – opening the door for competitors.
While Gemini shows promise, Google is no longer the bold innovator.
ChatGPT’s lead in user adoption is significant.
Once guided by “don’t be evil,” Google now faces skepticism from all sides.
Can Google still be trusted?
“Yes, as long as you aren’t a competitor, advertiser, or user.”
The DOJ’s antitrust trial is Google’s biggest legal challenge to date.
The DOJ laid out its plan to regulate Google, which Google didn’t like (e.g., selling off Chrome, its magic powder).
If Google is forced to sell Chrome, its power would decrease dramatically over time.
With great power comes… fragility.
Google’s dominance gives it unmatched reach – but it also makes every misstep a potential knockout.
The result? A more cautious, mistake-averse strategy.
This is the most popular argument – and it’s not baseless.
Louise Linehan analyzed the data and found:
More recently, self-linking has expanded:
This argument has merit, but its weight depends on how the average user perceives these shifts.
If users don’t mind being looped back into Google, it may not register as a problem.
Google does earn more from ad clicks, not just pageviews.
So, if users stay trapped in search without heading to monetizable queries, that’s not automatically a win for Google.
The flywheel only works if they can direct that loop toward ads.
Some argue Google is deliberately making search worse to boost revenue (we’ll look at the data later).
Revenue = Ad price x Query count.
Google increased CPC over time and is incentivized to increase query volume.
They’ve experimented with degrading quality before.
But given today’s scrutiny and pressure, I doubt they can afford to run tests like that now.
Their priorities – and risks – are different.
It’s true: Reddit’s presence in search results has exploded. Forum content is everywhere.
But Reddit isn’t the only forum seeing gains.
Reddit’s rise isn’t just about a deal, it reflects user preference.
During Reddit’s blackouts, Google visibly panicked, signaling how much it relies on the platform.
In 2023, 1% of all queries included Reddit.
On Kagi, a customizable search engine, users can block, lower, raise, or pin domains. Reddit ranks low on the “blocked” list and high on the “raised” and “pinned” lists.
AJ Kohn’s piece “It’s Goog Enough” makes a compelling case.
He covers more than what’s listed here, so give the full article a read. Highlights include:
AI Overviews compound the issue.
They occupy space like any other SERP feature, but without user interaction.
Sometimes, interacting with them can even hide organic results altogether.
This argument lands: Google seems focused on preserving the status quo, not innovating.
Still, users don’t seem too bothered.
Plus, Bing is loading up on ads, and Google labels their ads more clearly.
Most of these arguments are rooted in subjective impressions.
So, what does the data actually say?
There was an internal search quality study at Google in 2020.
For three months, Google degraded search by 1 IS point (equal to losing twice of Wikipedia’s information).
Revenue losses were minuscule.
Does this prove Google can make search worse on purpose?
I don’t think so, at least not long-term.
Three months is a short time.
The minuscule revenue losses were first-order consequences.
With measures like that, there are usually second- and third-order consequences.
With any survey, tread cautiously. There are often problems with:
Additionally, what we say, what we do, and what we feel often differ quite a bit.
Let’s look at three recent surveys:
But there are caveats:
Still, there’s value in the expert commentary at the end of the WalletHub piece.
Two responses in particular stood out.
Rand Fishkin said (emphasis mine):
Additionally, Michael King stated the following (emphasis mine):
There are no good surveys to make the claim that Google got worse.
If you didn’t read this study yourself, you probably heard about it at least 386 times, as it “proves that Google got worse.” I refute.
The study lasted from 2022 to 2023 and included 7,400 keywords with a pattern like “best [product category]”.
A niche riddled by affiliate spam for decades.
Even if the study concluded Google worsened in the tested field, that’s just one of many fields it plays in.
Additionally, 2022-2023 might as well be the Paleolithic era in tech time – that’s how fast things move.
How did the researchers measure quality?
From my SEO experience, this seems like a fraction of what Google measures to determine quality.
But that doesn’t matter if you read the researchers’ conclusions (emphasis mine):
Basically:
Search quality can decrease without any changes from Google.
We don’t have enough of it, both in numbers and replication.
The process for something to be scientifically proven is:
One study, even if it was methodologically sound, isn’t enough to prove either side right.
Tech-savvy people, especially SEOs (myself included), operate in a bubble.
Our search experience isn’t comparable to a normal person.
We “cry” about stuff the vast majority of people don’t care about. We are out of touch with reality.
Also, there’s the Facebook effect.
The idea is that we complain a lot, yet engage with the product as often or more frequently. Here are a few more examples:
I’ll add a personal anecdote.
For a long time, a smart group of pro wrestling fans (the Internet Wrestling Community, called IWC) complained about WWE, the biggest wrestling company.
Special forums, Reddit, and social media were plagued with negativity.
Even in arenas, those “smart fans” were audible on camera.
At the same time, WWE was doing well.
A vocal minority that loves to complain, lament and moan about everything, yet, watches every show.
Understand: We’re not the target audience.
History shows that if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it, people will eventually believe it, known as the illusory truth.
I’m not saying “Google getting worse” is a lie.
I don’t have the data to refute or verify my opinion, and neither does anyone else (besides Google).
As market leader, Google is under close supervision.
If they make a mistake, it rarely goes unnoticed and people talk about it, publishers write about it, and content creators document it.
Once you “really see things for the first time,” they seem everywhere.
This is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
When you spot flaws in Google search (or their AI products), you’ll perceive them more frequently, especially if you’re looking for them.
Taking shots at Google is mainstream in SEO, so better join the party:
“The mentality of a herd makes it easy to manage. Simply get more members moving in the desired direction and the others – responding not so much to the lead animal as to those immediately surrounding them – will peacefully and mechanically go along.”
– Robert Cialdini, psychologist and author
It’s easier to point fingers at others than at ourselves.
We like to think we’re the rational ones – “I’m not irrational, narcissistic, or greedy. It’s everyone else.”
Google says:
That’s 14,600,000,000,000 pages a year, an unimaginable number.
Why do search engines (not just Google) struggle to combat spam and find quality content?
It’s buried in the trash we put out there. More trash (for example, due to AI), the harder it is to surface great results.
Even if you argue that the average content quality is higher, the bell curve changes:
More average stuff = less bad and exceptional stuff.
The center becomes easier to hit, the ends harder to notice. This leads to content entropy, where the perceived density of good content is shrinking.
Search feels worse, but not due to any Google changes.
Lastly, we produce more mediocre content and love to manipulate.
There’s classic SEO manipulation like:
With AI and LLMs reshaping the web, it’s starting to feel like the Wild West again.
And when rules blur, some resort to tactics like:
SEO is weaponized for business and political impacts.
How ironic, we have less fun and destroy the system’s usefulness.
Talk is cheap; behavior isn’t.
Surveys and opinions can be misleading.
What people do matters more than what they say.
When someone claims, “No one Googles anymore,” chances are they’re either pushing an agenda or unaware of their own habits.
In reality, 99.8% of LLM users still rely on Google.
We don’t always say what we think or do what we say.
But we reveal our true preferences through our actions, and Google still dominates.
We don’t have enough data to make the claim.
What we know:
What we don’t know with certainty:
Google does a good job overall. Good enough to retain users and better than competitors.
Google doesn’t need to provide the best product.
It just needs to provide the least inconvenient option that’s easiest to justify.
When I wrote this piece, two questions kept coming back to me:
In 2013, I searched for a washing machine after moving out.
The results were flooded with affiliate links from people who hadn’t tested the product.
It’s not clear things were ever significantly better – just different.
The study cited notes that Google struggles with spam – but so do Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others.
Yes, search could be better.
But this isn’t a Google problem – it’s a web problem.
Search quality is a function of both the index and the content it pulls from.
Google is the gardener, but it can only work with the plants we grow.
So, where do we go from here?
We’re all part of this living, breathing web. If we want better search, we need to contribute to it.
Google is getting worse – or at least, that’s what “we” say.
The common complaint:
Search is dying, SEO is trash, and Google is nearly unusable.
X, LinkedIn, and Reddit are awash with complaints about deteriorating search quality.
The contradicting reality:
Search remains the dominant channel for web traffic.
Google still holds 90% of the search market, grew 20% year over year, and processes 5 trillion searches annually.
If it were truly broken, wouldn’t we have left by now?
The complex truth:
Poet John Keats described “negative capability” as the ability to hold conflicting ideas without demanding a simple answer.
That’s where we are with Google: it may be improving in many ways while simultaneously feeling worse.
The truth resists easy categorization.
This article:
Google wants to maximize profits. That means keeping us on its cash cow, search, and clicking on ads.
Simple, right?
Not quite. The deeper you go, the more complex the incentives become.
To keep the machine running, Google has to:
Every tweak to Search sets off a chain reaction across these groups, often creating tension or imbalance.
Google makes more money by showing more ads, but that comes at the cost of user satisfaction.
Ironically, the happier users are, the less Google earns compared to when users are just slightly less happy.
Quality is a soft, slippery metric – hard to define and even harder to measure.
Ask five people and you’ll get five definitions.
When we talk about search quality, we mean this:
That’s a solid proxy for user-centered quality, but it may not match Google’s priorities.
To stay dominant and profitable, Google has to juggle the expectations of all its stakeholders.
From its perspective, search quality improves if usage grows and revenue rises.
As the market leader, Google has always operated under pressure, but in the last 2–3 years, that pressure has intensified.
Here are five external forces that have increasingly constrained Google’s strategy.
Amazon has carved out a major share of high-value commercial queries.
In response, Google:
Social platforms have evolved into informal search engines, especially among younger users.
Google is adapting by integrating more social-style features into search:
Despite pioneering transformer tech, Google hesitated – opening the door for competitors.
While Gemini shows promise, Google is no longer the bold innovator.
ChatGPT’s lead in user adoption is significant.
Once guided by “don’t be evil,” Google now faces skepticism from all sides.
Can Google still be trusted?
“Yes, as long as you aren’t a competitor, advertiser, or user.”
The DOJ’s antitrust trial is Google’s biggest legal challenge to date.
The DOJ laid out its plan to regulate Google, which Google didn’t like (e.g., selling off Chrome, its magic powder).
If Google is forced to sell Chrome, its power would decrease dramatically over time.
With great power comes… fragility.
Google’s dominance gives it unmatched reach – but it also makes every misstep a potential knockout.
The result? A more cautious, mistake-averse strategy.
This is the most popular argument – and it’s not baseless.
Louise Linehan analyzed the data and found:
More recently, self-linking has expanded:
This argument has merit, but its weight depends on how the average user perceives these shifts.
If users don’t mind being looped back into Google, it may not register as a problem.
Google does earn more from ad clicks, not just pageviews.
So, if users stay trapped in search without heading to monetizable queries, that’s not automatically a win for Google.
The flywheel only works if they can direct that loop toward ads.
Some argue Google is deliberately making search worse to boost revenue (we’ll look at the data later).
Revenue = Ad price x Query count.
Google increased CPC over time and is incentivized to increase query volume.
They’ve experimented with degrading quality before.
But given today’s scrutiny and pressure, I doubt they can afford to run tests like that now.
Their priorities – and risks – are different.
It’s true: Reddit’s presence in search results has exploded. Forum content is everywhere.
But Reddit isn’t the only forum seeing gains.
Reddit’s rise isn’t just about a deal, it reflects user preference.
During Reddit’s blackouts, Google visibly panicked, signaling how much it relies on the platform.
In 2023, 1% of all queries included Reddit.
On Kagi, a customizable search engine, users can block, lower, raise, or pin domains. Reddit ranks low on the “blocked” list and high on the “raised” and “pinned” lists.
AJ Kohn’s piece “It’s Goog Enough” makes a compelling case.
He covers more than what’s listed here, so give the full article a read. Highlights include:
AI Overviews compound the issue.
They occupy space like any other SERP feature, but without user interaction.
Sometimes, interacting with them can even hide organic results altogether.
This argument lands: Google seems focused on preserving the status quo, not innovating.
Still, users don’t seem too bothered.
Plus, Bing is loading up on ads, and Google labels their ads more clearly.
Most of these arguments are rooted in subjective impressions.
So, what does the data actually say?
There was an internal search quality study at Google in 2020.
For three months, Google degraded search by 1 IS point (equal to losing twice of Wikipedia’s information).
Revenue losses were minuscule.
Does this prove Google can make search worse on purpose?
I don’t think so, at least not long-term.
Three months is a short time.
The minuscule revenue losses were first-order consequences.
With measures like that, there are usually second- and third-order consequences.
With any survey, tread cautiously. There are often problems with:
Additionally, what we say, what we do, and what we feel often differ quite a bit.
Let’s look at three recent surveys:
But there are caveats:
Still, there’s value in the expert commentary at the end of the WalletHub piece.
Two responses in particular stood out.
Rand Fishkin said (emphasis mine):
Additionally, Michael King stated the following (emphasis mine):
There are no good surveys to make the claim that Google got worse.
If you didn’t read this study yourself, you probably heard about it at least 386 times, as it “proves that Google got worse.” I refute.
The study lasted from 2022 to 2023 and included 7,400 keywords with a pattern like “best [product category]”.
A niche riddled by affiliate spam for decades.
Even if the study concluded Google worsened in the tested field, that’s just one of many fields it plays in.
Additionally, 2022-2023 might as well be the Paleolithic era in tech time – that’s how fast things move.
How did the researchers measure quality?
From my SEO experience, this seems like a fraction of what Google measures to determine quality.
But that doesn’t matter if you read the researchers’ conclusions (emphasis mine):
Basically:
Search quality can decrease without any changes from Google.
We don’t have enough of it, both in numbers and replication.
The process for something to be scientifically proven is:
One study, even if it was methodologically sound, isn’t enough to prove either side right.
Tech-savvy people, especially SEOs (myself included), operate in a bubble.
Our search experience isn’t comparable to a normal person.
We “cry” about stuff the vast majority of people don’t care about. We are out of touch with reality.
Also, there’s the Facebook effect.
The idea is that we complain a lot, yet engage with the product as often or more frequently. Here are a few more examples:
I’ll add a personal anecdote.
For a long time, a smart group of pro wrestling fans (the Internet Wrestling Community, called IWC) complained about WWE, the biggest wrestling company.
Special forums, Reddit, and social media were plagued with negativity.
Even in arenas, those “smart fans” were audible on camera.
At the same time, WWE was doing well.
A vocal minority that loves to complain, lament and moan about everything, yet, watches every show.
Understand: We’re not the target audience.
History shows that if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it, people will eventually believe it, known as the illusory truth.
I’m not saying “Google getting worse” is a lie.
I don’t have the data to refute or verify my opinion, and neither does anyone else (besides Google).
As market leader, Google is under close supervision.
If they make a mistake, it rarely goes unnoticed and people talk about it, publishers write about it, and content creators document it.
Once you “really see things for the first time,” they seem everywhere.
This is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
When you spot flaws in Google search (or their AI products), you’ll perceive them more frequently, especially if you’re looking for them.
Taking shots at Google is mainstream in SEO, so better join the party:
“The mentality of a herd makes it easy to manage. Simply get more members moving in the desired direction and the others – responding not so much to the lead animal as to those immediately surrounding them – will peacefully and mechanically go along.”
– Robert Cialdini, psychologist and author
It’s easier to point fingers at others than at ourselves.
We like to think we’re the rational ones – “I’m not irrational, narcissistic, or greedy. It’s everyone else.”
Google says:
That’s 14,600,000,000,000 pages a year, an unimaginable number.
Why do search engines (not just Google) struggle to combat spam and find quality content?
It’s buried in the trash we put out there. More trash (for example, due to AI), the harder it is to surface great results.
Even if you argue that the average content quality is higher, the bell curve changes:
More average stuff = less bad and exceptional stuff.
The center becomes easier to hit, the ends harder to notice. This leads to content entropy, where the perceived density of good content is shrinking.
Search feels worse, but not due to any Google changes.
Lastly, we produce more mediocre content and love to manipulate.
There’s classic SEO manipulation like:
With AI and LLMs reshaping the web, it’s starting to feel like the Wild West again.
And when rules blur, some resort to tactics like:
SEO is weaponized for business and political impacts.
How ironic, we have less fun and destroy the system’s usefulness.
Talk is cheap; behavior isn’t.
Surveys and opinions can be misleading.
What people do matters more than what they say.
When someone claims, “No one Googles anymore,” chances are they’re either pushing an agenda or unaware of their own habits.
In reality, 99.8% of LLM users still rely on Google.
We don’t always say what we think or do what we say.
But we reveal our true preferences through our actions, and Google still dominates.
We don’t have enough data to make the claim.
What we know:
What we don’t know with certainty:
Google does a good job overall. Good enough to retain users and better than competitors.
Google doesn’t need to provide the best product.
It just needs to provide the least inconvenient option that’s easiest to justify.
When I wrote this piece, two questions kept coming back to me:
In 2013, I searched for a washing machine after moving out.
The results were flooded with affiliate links from people who hadn’t tested the product.
It’s not clear things were ever significantly better – just different.
The study cited notes that Google struggles with spam – but so do Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others.
Yes, search could be better.
But this isn’t a Google problem – it’s a web problem.
Search quality is a function of both the index and the content it pulls from.
Google is the gardener, but it can only work with the plants we grow.
So, where do we go from here?
We’re all part of this living, breathing web. If we want better search, we need to contribute to it.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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