With a new round of legal issues, this time from disgruntled companies rather than the US government, and more agitation from the SEO community, Google’s reputation is taking another battering.
Way back in the dim and distant past (June last year), we posted a blog highlighting Google’s woes. Back then, the antitrust case from the Department of Justice was in full swing, and both the EU and British governments were considering similar legal battles with the search giant. This was combined with increasing dissatisfaction with the quality and relevance of search results, the unease of many advertisers at putting their marketing budgets in the hands of Google’s AI, and the rather embarrassing launch of various AI services - such as Gemini’s image creation feature ignoring historical reality for modern equality and creating images of female popes and black SS officers, or the new AI Overviews recommending you include rocks in your diet.
Legal Issues
Much of this seems to have blown over. Google were not forced to sell off Chrome, a core part of their business model, by the US courts after being found to be using unfair practices to assure their market dominance. This was a big one, as Chrome reports back to Google about user behaviour, information Google then uses as a ranking signal in their search engine. The full penalty for Google’s misdeeds hasn’t been decided yet, but glances are being made at their advertising platform and possibly sharing the data they collect.
Two UK class action lawsuits against Google are still underway, both revolve around Google’s search dominance, resulting in price fixing. With a total of $20 billion as the claimed damages. This is running concurrently with an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority into Google’s business practices relating to their advertising services, especially in the light of last year’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.
Over on the continent, the EU recently fined Google €2.95 billion for antitrust violations relating to advertising technology, following up the record €4.1 billion fine for antitrust violations relating to their Android operating system from back in June. They are also investigating if Google’s Play Store violates the Digital Markets Act (they’re also looking closely at Apple for similar behaviour).
AI, Copyright, and the Death of Clicks
AI Overviews, after a rocky start, have swiftly become a mainstay of people’s search experience, followed earlier this year with Google’s new AI Mode, that appears more chatbot than search engine. There are complaints that AI Overviews are still unreliable, and it’s definitely true that asking it leading questions is likely to make it bend itself in logical knots trying to prove you right, rather than telling you flat out that you’re wrong. It can also have difficulty with such questions as, “Is it 2025?” Although it does seem to be improving.
One reputational hit Google took, especially within the professional SEO crowd, is that they recently let go all of their third-party human AI technicians. These were the people back-checking Google AI’s learning material and developmental processes. Google considered these people to have done their job. But from the outside, it does appear to be a callous cost-cutting exercise for a still-developing technology that has yet to prove itself entirely reliable.
As with many generative AI owners, Google are facing a lawsuit for using copyrighted material in their training data. Artists v Google is the case in question, and Google’s request for a summary dismissal was overruled by a judge in the US, as the plaintiffs demonstrated that there was a case to answer. While this class action suit is big news, Penske Media suing over I Overviews stealing content and traffic is possibly more dangerous for Google’s current business model. The publisher of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety is claiming that AI Overviews steal data from their articles without permission and have reduced the number of visitors (and hence advertising revenue) to their sites.
Penske’s claims are not without merit. The entire SEO community has noticed similar trends with traffic trending down ever since AI Overviews came onto the scene. This trend is especially noticeable for informational websites, which means news and similar publications are going to be hardest hit. Google’s recently appointed head of search, Liz Reid, drew ire by claiming that organic click volume has remained relatively stable year-on-year, despite the SEO community showing that there have been significant drops in actual clicks across the board using data provided by Google themselves.
Reporting Sabotage
Google quietly did away with the ability to bring up 100 results at once in the search results. While this may sound like an unusual thing to worry about, it’s the function that third-party ranking tools utilised to tell you where in the search results your website appeared for various search terms.
There was no real warning that this was happening, and it took Google almost two weeks to make a statement about it. That the statement was, “This was never an officially approved search function,” rather than an explanation of why it was taken away didn’t help the collective blood pressure of the SEO crowd.
That Google did this right in the middle of the longest Spam Update they’ve rolled out in a couple of years struck some as suspicious. Especially given the change resulting in a noticeable trend in organic reports. Universally, websites saw their impressions drop, while their positions improved considerably.
Theories about this trend abounded, from Google breaking their own reporting functionality to aliens, but the consensus now is that those impressions were fake. All those reporting tools, collecting search result data, were inflating the number of impressions beyond page one. With these tools suddenly restricted to the first page (without some considerable rebuilding), all of the times your website’s listing appeared whenever anyone ran a ranking report for a keyword vaguely related to you no longer appear as impressions in your organic search report.
This action has the SEO community divided. While many think that search positioning after the end of the first page is pointless, others (myself included) feel that the position 11 to 100 data is valuable for diagnosing potential problems or identifying potential gains.
What is unifying the professional community is disgust at Google’s lack of official communications about the change or its impact. The dismissal that it wasn’t an officially supported function is the only communication from Google.
VPNs and Fake Nationalities
One potential problem we had raised concerns about was the sudden massive growth in VPN usage in the UK from July. A (widely predicted and almost certainly inevitable) consequence of the Online Safety Act, we blogged about this as well and the potential for skewing organic and paid search with additional visitors from outside the UK.
Currently, we’re not seeing a noticeable change in traffic to our websites from the UK to other countries. One factor that may be working in our favour is that our clients are not marketing to under 18s at all. In fact, many of our clients are B2B, meaning their target audience are not only the least likely to resort to free overseas VPNs to avoid the OSA, but are also likely using dedicated work devices, which further reduces the chances of this affecting them.
The Bottom Line
While Google's legal issues may cost them some money and their reputation among web professionals is suffering a little, their market dominance seems firm. Statcounter shows that Google's market share in the UK is still above 90% with little change from 2024. So, regardless of whether Google's actions have been illegal or just plain irritating, people are still using them.
