If I asked you to name the single most indispensable product in the digital world, what would you say? I can already hear you shouting “Gooooogle!” And you’d be right. Google is the engine of the internet. The door to everything. But could that engine — the one that seems impossible to live without — one day break down?
In this post, you’ll find Google’s new strategy, the potentially irreversible risks it’s taking, the impact of artificial intelligence, and the changes that may be coming. Let’s get into it…
I’ve written about the power of habits many times across various posts, because one of the things that makes a product truly indispensable is the habits it creates. That’s the foundation of the habit-forming product.
See: You Have a Notification! – The Attention Industry and Our Habits
Another factor is competition — or rather, the absence of it. When a product or company becomes a monopoly, the lack of meaningful alternatives can make it feel irreplaceable.
We use products like this every day. Want to send a message? Use WhatsApp. Watch a video? Open YouTube. Share a photo? Head to Instagram.
WANT TO SEARCH FOR SOMETHING? USE GOOGLE.
Like many digital products, Google fits this mould perfectly. In fact, it might be the most indispensable of all. Its clean, habit-forming simplicity combined with years of drinking alone at the well have made it near-impossible to walk away from.
But things have started to shift. Google, which holds roughly 90% of the search engine market, has been going through a rocky patch. The most visible cause has been the artificial intelligence wave currently sweeping through the industry. But we can’t ignore the updates to the search algorithm that defines what Google is, nor the radical decisions that could fundamentally change the company’s future. So what happened, and how? Let’s get into it.
1. The search algorithm “updates”
Google’s search algorithm is the company’s crown jewel. Its Holy Grail. When you search for something, the order of results you see is determined by that algorithm. Among its known criteria — or rather, the ones whose effects we’ve observed — are page speed, trustworthiness, content structure, code optimisation, freshness, URL structure, social media signals, backlinks, and hundreds more.
There are equally many criteria that aren’t publicly known, and Google doesn’t announce them. Occasionally it does disclose some — the E-E-A-T system for evaluating content quality, for example. But for years, two things have been consistent: “Optimise for users, not for Google”, and “produce quality content”.
Do that, Google says, and sit back. The size of your company, whether you advertise, how many backlinks you have — none of that matters, apparently…
Does it though?
Of course not. It never did. Some known ranking factors have faded in significance over time, but most remain very much in play.
Backlinks are a good example. Google has said for years: “Focus on content, not backlinks”. And yet everyone in the industry knows that a site without a backlink strategy has very little chance of survival. Even as its influence is said to be waning, it remains a significant factor.
Note: Negative SEO and result manipulation are a separate topic, which I’m setting aside for now.
For years, Google gave sites that produced “quality content” and met key SEO criteria a reasonable chance of ranking. The size of a site mattered in some cases, but smaller, independent publishers were at least partially treated fairly. This gave rise to an entire industry of SEO agencies and consultants serving companies of every size.
Then Google began periodically updating its algorithm — ostensibly to clean up results and create a fairer, more balanced playing field. But almost every update made you nostalgic for the last one, and left a trail of weeping independent publishers in its wake.
Over time, the appearance of search results changed dramatically. More ad placements, knowledge panels, Wikipedia summaries, rich results, video and news carousels, AMP pages — the structure of a results page shifted considerably. Organic websites found themselves naturally pushed further and further down.
Organic content creators scrambled to adapt to every new development and algorithm update, just trying to stay afloat. But when the company on the other side says one thing and does another, lies, and sidesteps every question, what’s the point.
Content creators told Google “we won’t die that easily, you’ll have to do better”. Google took that as an invitation. Looking at the algorithm updates of recent years, you can see exactly what followed.
These updates gradually eliminated many independent sites from the ecosystem. There’s no middle class anymore, in plain terms. The rich got richer, the middle got poor, the poor stayed poor.
Is it a coincidence that search results around the world have recently filled up with Reddit pages? Of course not. Google struck a deal with Reddit worth $60 million a year to use the platform’s data to train its AI. It then wrapped this up neatly by saying “users were already finding what they wanted on Reddit, so we made the deal”. Convenient.
Should we unplug Google and have everyone switch to Reddit? But someone has to get poorer while someone else gets richer, right?
In the end, Google — like Facebook throttling its users’ reach once it got a taste for the algorithm, like Elon Musk putting a price tag on free speech on Twitter, like OpenAI adding “Open” to its name to ride the wave of open-source goodwill before turning commercial — put money first and left its users behind.
See: A Nightingale in a Golden Cage, Dying Slowly
“Google is a business, not a charity — of course it’ll choose money,” I can hear you saying. That thought takes us neatly to the second point.
2. The man who broke the engine: Prabhakar Raghavan
Most of you have probably never heard this name. Perfectly understandable — he’s one of those Google executives who prefers to stay out of the spotlight.
Raghavan left Yahoo after a string of failures there and joined Google in 2012, taking charge of the company’s advertising division. In 2020, he was moved to head Google Search — the company’s backbone. Everything that happened afterwards happened after that.
From almost the very beginning, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been careful to keep Google Ads and Google Search separate and operationally independent. This way, Search would remain organic and continue to be the company’s core.
That distinction was fundamental. It was part of what made Google, Google. Until Prabhakar Raghavan took over from Ben Gomes — a 1999-era Googler described internally as a “hero.”
The story first came to light through internal email threads published by the US Department of Justice as part of an antitrust case against Google. Those emails revealed certain breaking points and showed the world what kind of transformation the company was undergoing.
Note: Edward Zitron’s piece, “The Man Who Killed Google Search,” which analysed these emails in detail, reportedly made Google rather uncomfortable.
In an email dated 5 February 2019, Google’s VP of Ads Jerry Dischler and VP of Engineering, Ads and Search Shiv Venkataraman flagged a “code yellow” alarm — warning that daily active user numbers were falling, search revenue was dropping, and that they would significantly miss targets for the quarter.
Note: At Google, a “code yellow” is essentially “a state of emergency” — the company’s highest-level alert, which requires everyone to drop whatever they’re doing and focus on the issue at hand.
The email thread continued, and the proposals for closing the revenue gap brought the independently operating Ads and Search teams into direct conflict. The Ads and Finance teams pushed proposals that would blur the line between Search and Ads; the Search team pointed out that there was a reason the founders had kept the two separate.
Ben Gomes, then heading Google Search, pushed back against the growth demands from the Ads and Finance teams. Nick Fox, VP of Search and Google Assistant, countered that Search was “the company’s revenue engine” and that this new reality was simply part of their job.
In an email, Gomes noted that “Search was getting too close to money” and expressed concern that “all Google ever thought about was growth”.
One week before the code yellow was resolved, the March 2019 algorithm update was released. Billed as “the biggest search update in a long time”, it had the opposite of its intended effect. Sites that Gomes’s spam updates had previously suppressed saw dramatic traffic increases. It became clear that changes made to improve search quality had actually been quietly reversed. The code yellow was leaving its mark.
Just a few months later, the visual design of search ads — previously distinguished by a green label — was changed to look virtually identical to organic results. Which ad was which, and which result was organic, became almost impossible to tell at a glance. Another consequence of the code yellow.
About a year later, Prabhakar Raghavan — the architect of the code yellow — was appointed to head Google Search. Ben Gomes was transferred to Google’s Education division. The man who had spent 20 years developing Search around the user had been outmanoeuvred by a Wall Street-minded executive focused purely on financial growth.
With Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s approval, Raghavan and the Ads team — focused entirely on financial growth — had defeated Gomes and the Search team, who had been focused on user-centred development.
The line between Google Ads and Google Search had been crossed. Both products now moved together toward a single goal: financial growth, and nothing else.
It worked, too. In its Q1 2024 earnings report, Google announced revenue of $80.5 billion — a 15% increase, well above expectations. Shareholders and the architects of this strategy were satisfied. The code yellow had delivered.
But it didn’t end there.
3. The new AI rra of Google
The artificial intelligence sector — which technology giants have entered with an intensity never seen before — began growing at a staggering pace. Photos, illustrations, voiceovers, music, videos, games, digital assistants: industry after industry started claiming its share of this new and extraordinary technology.
We’re all witnessing this firsthand now, because this technology has been brought to the consumer level and has created an intensely competitive commercial space among the tech giants.
We now chat with AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT, generate images on platforms like Midjourney, and run translations through DeepL. AI-powered tools are something many of us use on a daily basis.
To improve these tools and gain a competitive edge, companies need access to enormous volumes of user data. Some can draw on their own user bases, but others have had to form partnerships to get what they need.
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI, OpenAI partnered with Reddit, Reddit partnered with Google. Everyone’s in bed with everyone…
One of these partnerships — Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI for its Bing search engine — made a significant splash and drove a meaningful uptick in Bing’s usage. For Google, the dominant player in search, this represented a genuine threat.
Sleeves were rolled up. Work began on integrating Gemini — Google’s generative AI, developed to rival OpenAI — into the search engine that sits at the heart of the company.
At Google I/O 2024, its developer conference on 14 May 2024, the company announced a series of new features. Features that could significantly reshape Google’s future and how users interact with it. The most significant was a new Gemini-powered search experience called “AI Overviews” — set to change the search experience entirely.
From Search Engine to Publisher
Under this new approach, you’ll no longer need to scroll through a page of search results and click on listed websites to find what you’re looking for. Instead, Gemini will give you the answer directly — just like ChatGPT. You stay on Google. You don’t go anywhere else. Exactly as Google intends.
Does any of this sound familiar?
I’ve followed social media algorithms closely for years, and the pattern they follow is always the same. Every update is presented as an improvement to the user experience. Yet with every update, your visibility shrinks a little more. The reason your photos get fewer likes now, the reason your profile is seen by fewer people — this is why.
And if you dare to share a link, things get worse. Starting with Facebook and continuing with post-Musk Twitter, the algorithm treats sharing a link as a kind of insult to the platform. Because sharing a link means directing your followers somewhere else. How dare you!
If you want your posts and profile to be seen, you have to share not what you want to share, but what the platform wants — at the frequency it wants, in the format it wants. You have to use the platform not for yourself, but for Facebook, for Twitter, for Instagram.
Which leaves you with two options: produce content “for the platform” at a rate that takes over your life, or pay to advertise.
Google, structurally, has always sat in a different position from social media platforms. Because unlike them, Google’s purpose has been to direct users to the sites containing the information they’re looking for.
If you’re a content creator, you’ve had two options for visibility on Google: produce SEO-friendly, user-focused content, or buy Google ads.
In Google’s new era, even that is changing. From a Google that connects users with the sources of information, to a Google that delivers the information itself. From a Google that provides a platform for publishers as a search engine, to a Google that is becoming a publisher.
Until recently, many publishers didn’t believe Google would ever make a move this radical. Because Google needs publishers — for its data pipeline and to support its ad revenue — just as much as it needs users. But Google appears determined to push through this transformation regardless.
We saw a comparable moment with Facebook. At the peak of the blockchain and metaverse hype, Facebook made a radical decision to restructure the entire company around the metaverse — changing even its name to Meta in the process. Billions were poured into metaverse technology. The expected returns never arrived. The result was a 60% revenue loss for the company.
Google’s radical decisions around its own backbone — Google Search — could very plausibly lead to a similarly unhappy ending. The idea that a company which built its value on connecting users and publishers can continue to thrive by satisfying only its advertisers, without keeping users or publishers happy, is not just optimistic. It’s naive.
I’m aware that AI shouldn’t be equated with the metaverse delusion. But competing with other firms, protecting market share, and pursuing growth through people like Prabhakar Raghavan with a single-minded focus on financial metrics — I believe this ambition will cause more damage than it creates value.
Conclusion
Algorithm updates that erode what made Search what it was, executives willing to play with the company’s crown jewel, Wall Street mindsets focused exclusively on financial growth, and an ambition to compete at all costs by dismantling the company’s own backbone — all of this tells us that a very different Google may be waiting for us on the other side.
In this process, we’ll see who loses out: the publisher removed from the user-advertiser-publisher-Google equation; the user being forced to change their habits and lose access to the original sources of information; the advertiser being squeezed into paying more to compete; or Google itself, taking an enormous gamble with a radical set of decisions. There is, of course, one more scenario — one where everyone loses…
Maybe a giant that was supposed to be unbreakable needs to go through this. Maybe a culture that was built on “Don’t Be Evil” needs to reckon with what happens when it becomes evil. Maybe sometimes a single hard lesson is worth more than a thousand warnings. We’ll see…
UPDATE — 4 DAYS LATER (24 May 2024): The AI Overviews feature integrated into Google Search has already started causing problems. Drawing on Reddit data, it’s been offering misleading health advice, presenting harmful recipes, and giving incorrect information. (See: Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza)
UPDATE — 8 DAYS LATER (28 May 2024): The BBC published a detailed new analysis on the subject worth adding here — a thorough breakdown of who has won and who has lost from the algorithm updates. (See: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same)
UPDATE — 9 DAYS LATER (29 May 2024): An internal Google document about its closely guarded search algorithm has leaked. This document shows that criteria Google has publicly denied influence search rankings are in fact highly significant. In other words, Google lied to us again. (See: Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked)
UPDATE — 11 DAYS LATER (31 May 2024): Google has admitted it botched the AI Overviews rollout. Take a look at the statement — the justifications, the excuses. Even Google’s communication culture has changed. Dramatically. (See: AI Overviews: About last week)