Google's search dominance drops to a 15-year low, Media outlets hit by site reputation policy & more

Did you know that Google search engine share dropped to a 15-year low in the USA? So its share fell to 77%. Typically it's 85 to 90%. Bing increased their share by 5% to 13%. So things are changing. This tweet came from Kieran Flanagan, who is the HubSpot VP of Marketing. He went to Zapier to become CMO, and now he's going back to HubSpot, by the way.

Oh, cool.

Which is interesting. Yeah.

And so Google share has decreased. And what is this time period?

This is— this was in— took a hit in April.

Of this year?

Uh-huh.

Just recently they just lost 5%. I'm assuming it's been gradual because that's too big of a share to just drop.

It said, um, I don't know, it said it fell. Like, I don't know over what time period it fell, but Bing increased their— I think this is over a certain time period, not just one month.

Because it's funny, I've been looking at similar web data for Google and I've been tracking it for a while and I put a tweet out about this. maybe a month or two ago, Google's traffic has been doing pretty well, like for their search engine. It hasn't been really declining much at all.

Mm-hmm.

But on the flip side, uh, you know, SimilarWeb, I mean, SimilarWeb showing that ChatGPT's growing at a faster pace, but Google and Bing have been going at similar paces. So like if I look up at SimilarWeb, uh, google.com, because you can end up seeing the traffic stats, it's number one. If you look at Where's the traffic? 83.5 billion. And March was up 84.8 billion. April was down 2 billion. And if I do SimilarWeb for Bing, the last time I checked, it was very similar stats.

In terms of the growth rate?

Oh no, on this. Yeah, April, Bing is up 78 million. So Bing went from 1.4 To 1.5. Google went from 85 to 83.5. So they lost some market share in April.

That's interesting.

But compared to February, February Bing went from 1.3 to 1.5. All right? So you're doing 0.2 divided by 1.3. That's 15% growth. That's not bad. Google went from 83.5, they ended with 83.5, they're at 81.1 before, so 2.4. So Google grew 3% when Bing grew, what did I say, 15%?

Yeah.

Yeah, so Bing's growing at a much faster pace. But Google overall is still growing in traffic when you look at it over a long period of time.

Yep. It's interesting. Well, I mean, speaking of Google, by the way, did you see the site reputation policy stuff where a bunch of these sites are getting— sections of their sites are getting torched? Like CNN, USA Today, LA Times, they all got hit by Google site reputation abuse policy. So basically they have these coupon sections on their sites, like the affiliate Yeah. They've all been like deindexed, I believe, or hit really hard. And so Google is trying to clean up their search results because here's the thing, like oftentimes I'll search for things, I actually end up going to Reddit to look for reviews there, which takes longer, but I feel like I can trust Reddit more, right? So I find that, you know, for a lot of affiliate marketers out there, I think the game is going to change quite a bit now.

So speaking of that, did you hear what the Google CEO said about the future of links and AI and search quality being worse?

No.

Okay, so this one's Search Engine Land, future of links. Unlike in previous statements where Sundar indicated that the search experience would evolve substantially— I'm terrible at reading— in the next 10 years.

Substantially.

Thank you. In the next 10 years, in the Bloomberg interview, he seemed to indicate that links to websites will continue to be an important part of Google search results. So they're pretty much saying that Google search results, Won't get worse, or I mean we'll still have links. And then when they talked about the search results getting worse, they're saying anytime there's a lot of big change, you know you get good, you get bad, and then you got to work on fixing and cleaning it up. Yeah, and they're just saying there's a lot of changes.

They're like recalibrating right now.

Bingo! Yes.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, which I mean it's going to get even worse because did you know now Screaming Frog now allows you to automate SEO?

They do. I saw that.

Yeah. So this tweet is from Go Fish Chris. This is Chris Long. So Screaming Frog's OpenAI integration. allows you to automate tons of basic SEO tasks. So just for everyone to know, Screaming Frog, back in the day when I used to use it, it's still a great tool. Neil and I don't spend time crawling our sites anymore. But you use it to crawl your site. It's like the best crawler out there, right? But now there's an OpenAI integration and basically you can have it automatically change your title tags, right? You can have it change your headers and things like that. So This guy shows how to do it. It's like a technical how-to, which I'm not going to read through right now. But if you're like a non-technical SEO and you're using Screaming Frog and you can do this at scale to optimize your site, then why wouldn't you do it? Because this is stuff you usually would need to wait weeks for a developer to do.

I'm with you, but I would just have humans double-check it to make sure it's actually making the right changes.

Meta descriptions, alt text, category page text, structured data. I'm pretty sure you can update Portions of content too.

It would scale. It would be nice if they had the data that you had from— what was the old SEO company that you had, the software?

ClickFlow.

ClickFlow, where you analyze the meta tags.

Don't worry, it's coming back.

Ah, cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you feed that into Screaming Frog and then they're making meta tag changes based on that.

So what we're doing internally right now is we've built stuff that will auto-optimize pages, right? But we also want to show the before and after to make it very clear. And we also want people to be able to accept on their own so it doesn't just change things automatically. And then they can also revert the changes too.

Yeah, that's cool.

All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketing Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside.

On a side note, speaking of Google and SEO, did you see what they're doing with streaming audiences?

No.

Google introduced a plan to rethink programmatic TV by having advertisers centralize their streaming ad buys through its web-based-focused demand-side platform.

Oh, it's like Google Ads for programmatic.

Bingo. So DV360. So pretty much if you want to buy ads on Disney, you can buy them through Google. And I think it's a smart move because there's a lot of monopolistic issues with these publicly traded companies. And it's funny, you see like Snap and Pinterest and Reddit, they're small, they generate some ad revenue, not tons. In an ideal world, if Google was allowed, I bet you they would just be like, Pinterest, you've done well enough, we're going to buy you. Reddit, we're going to buy you. X, we're going to buy you. And they keep going on and on because they can just take their whole advertiser base and be like, boom, pop it on all these audiences and they would generate way more revenue per click. Yeah. Than what X or Pinterest or any of these guys do in arbitrage on that end.

And the problem right now is they can't buy anything because the M&A market, the FTC cracks down on big tech, right? So you just can't buy anything right now.

But they have the cash.

Yeah, they have the cash. They would for sure buy it if they could. But the FTC would stop them.

They're cheap acquisitions for them. And generally they're like, wait, you charge half the amount per click that we would get? Cool, we'll buy you your, you know, 15 times, 20 times profit, no problem. When we buy you, it'll end up becoming 10 times profit just because we're getting double, Per click, and they'll just make the math work out better.

Reddit market cap eight point four billion. Snap market cap what is it? Snap is twenty six billion. Okay, and then the market cap for Pinterest you said?

Yeah, it's less than thirty.

Twenty nine, twenty nine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all very affordable. Warren Buffett could buy them if he wants.

But well, no, they Google did a seventy was it seventy billion dollar buyback?

Did they?

I think it was seventy. Google billion. Yeah, $70 billion. Alphabet issues first dividend and $70 billion buyback. So yeah, but in that $70 billion, instead of buying back their stock, they could have bought Pinterest, Snap, Reddit, and still had money left over.

But they're like FTC, so we might as well just do this buyback. It'll benefit us for the long term. And then when it cools down a little bit, we'll just go buy these things. Yeah. So whatever, you know, government does disrupt, like these companies figure out a way. The other thing, just going back to your thing here, this demand-side platform, DV360. Is when you think about television, it's becoming less of a black box, but it's been a black box for a very long time. It's like, how do you get these ads on these, these, these, these, uh, what is this, Disney, you said? What else did you say?

Streaming, connected TV.

Yeah, connected TV, right? It's become less complex over the years, but it's still a little like, you know, people aren't as comfortable. It's not as easy as just going into Google Ads and Meta, and this is going to make it even easier. So I think that's a good thing.

It is. And you know what, I bet you Google gets a cut for driving You know, what is that, placement? And Google's like, oh cool, we don't have to do anything other than sell it to our existing advertisers. It's almost pure profit for them.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Did you hear about the, the AI tool infecting the media industry?

No.

Okay, so remember when Sports Illustrated got in trouble for fake writers?

Yeah.

So this tool is called Advon. That's A-D-V-O-N. It's the AI-powered content monster infecting the media industry. So basically it's It's got its tendrils in other surprisingly prominent publications. This is from futurism.com. So, what's going on over here? A few years back, a writer in a developing country started doing contract work for a company called Advon Commerce, getting a few pennies per word to write online product reviews. But the writer, who like other Advon sources interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity, recalls that the gig's responsibilities soon shifted. Instead of writing, they were now tasked with polishing drafts generated using an AI system the company was developing. Hmm. Internally dubbed Mel. They started using AI for content generation, the former Advon worker told us, and paid even less than what they were paying before. So like pennies, it's even less now. The former writer was asked to leave detailed notes on Mel's work, feedback they believed to use to fine-tune the AI, which would eventually replace their role entirely. Um, and soon after, we were released from our positions as writers. So we first heard of Advon last year after a year after staff at Gannett— so Gannett has like USA Today and all these publications— noticed product reviews getting published on the website of USA Today with bylines that didn't seem to correspond to real people. The articles were stilted and formulaic, leading to the writers union to accuse them of being shoddy AI. When Gannett blamed the strange articles on Advon, we started digging. We soon found Advon had been running a similar operation at the magazine Sports Illustrated, publishing product reviews using bylines of fake writers with fictional blah, blah, blah. Eventually, the Sports Illustrated CEO got fired, and then I think Sports Illustrated is just gone completely now. It's basically on a lot of these different sites. It just goes to show you again, the example here is crappy AI doesn't work.

It does not work. If you're going to use AI, use it with AI combined with a human and take the time to make it amazing versus just using AI.

Yeah, look, if you're responsible for these publications, you're putting your job at risk if you're using stuff like this. I think for the next 5 years at least, you should have a human in the loop. There should be some type of mechanism to spot-check things, to undo things as well. Because what you don't want is you don't want to sign up for something like this. You're tied into like an annual contract and then you, you get screwed at the end of the day for making a stupid mistake like this.

I bet you in the next Super Bowl or maybe even Olympics, because Olympics is coming up soon, someone is going to use AI for their ad and just make it pure AI-generated.

Yeah.

All right.

So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster.

And, uh, yeah, make sure you go there. Next time you do a call, let me know, I'll join the call.

Oh, there you go, join it. Um, once we get to around 50-ish paying members or so, we're gonna do the call with Neil. And, uh, yeah, it's gonna be a good time.

We're pretty close to that already, right?

Like 39, right?

Yeah, so join, would love to do it, and I can break down all the stuff that we're doing to grow. And we're growing fast. To give you an idea, we'll go from start of this year, 750 employees. My guess is we'll end the year with Yep.

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