In March, Giselle Navarro watched Google search traffic to her website, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh rates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020 when the pandemic caused a surge in demand for air purifiers, and at its peak had 15 paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio Ashton founded.) Google traffic to HouseFresh had been gradually declining since October last year, but the recent drop has been even more dramatic, dropping to about 4,000 search referrals, or about 300 click-throughs from Google search results, per day. The site makes money through affiliate fees, and receives a small commission when readers click HouseFresh's link and buy an air purifier online. Less traffic means less revenue, and now the company can only afford to hire one full-time employee. “We're living as if Google was gone,” Navarro said.
The decline in traffic to HouseFresh coincides with under-the-hood changes to Google's search functionality. In late 2023, Google rolled out a series of algorithm changes and made those changes permanent with a “core update” in March. While HouseFresh reviews previously ranked highly in Google searches for air purifiers, they have recently been buried beneath recommendations from prominent publishers.Better Homes and Gardens, People, Architectural Digest (Owned by Condé Nast, New YorkerNavarro noticed Rolling Stoneshe saw a Penske Media-owned music magazine recommending an anti-mold humidifier. It seemed to her like a media company was trying to cash in on affiliate revenue without the expertise her own site had worked so hard to cultivate. And it seemed like Google was rewarding them for it. House Fresh followed Google's search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines. The company recommends that websites “provide original information” and demonstrate “experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.” But this no longer seemed to be working. “People feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro said. “It's lying to our faces and gaslighting us.” She began publishing articles on House Fresh about the decline in search traffic, with headlines like “How Google is Killing Independent Sites Like Us.” The articles drew more search traffic than reviews.
In May, we got a glimpse into the inner workings of Google Search when 2,500 pages of the company's internal documents were leaked. The files were apparently uploaded to GitHub by an unknown person in March, but only attracted attention when search engine optimization consultant Erfan Azimi sent them to veteran SEO expert and industry commentator Rand Fishkin. The leaked documents were Google Search's API (Application Programming Interface), a sort of directory of labels that external developers can reference in their code to call up information from Google's internal infrastructure. It's a vast list of coding tags that are incomprehensible to the average reader. But while the documents identify many of the variables that Google's search algorithm considers, they don't go into detail about how those variables are weighted or how sites' rankings are ultimately determined.
Some of the information revealed seems to contradict what the company has publicly asserted. One of the variables Google Search tracks is when and where users click, not just on Google's core sites but on every page visited within Google's Chrome browser. Google has repeatedly denied incorporating that data into its search algorithms. Fishkin told me that this “strengthens an already long-held belief among SEO experts that Google's public officials frequently lie, mislead, and omit important information.” The algorithm also tags personal sites and blogs as “smallPersonalSite,” which some interpret as a sign that the company is ranking them lower in search results in favor of larger publications. (A Google spokesperson denied that the company is negatively targeting small sites, saying the leaked documents may contain “information that is out of context, out of date, or incomplete.”) The dominant factor in Google Search rankings appears to be a company's or site's existing popularity. This represents a change. “Google no longer rewards the slick, smart, SEO-savvy publishers who know all the right tricks. It rewards established brands, measurable popularity in search, and established domains that searchers already know and click on,” Fishkin wrote in a blog post run by his company, SparkToro. Better Homes and Gardens—Although, anecdotally, even traditional publications have been hit hard in Google search traffic lately.
The decline of Google Search began long before the recent series of algorithm changes. I wrote in 2022 about how search results are worsening as authoritative sites are increasingly crowded out by over-optimized clickbait results and text from Google's “Quick Answers” feature. The promise of Google's search engine is to answer queries with the most “relevant results.” If a website builder provides enough high-quality content on a particular subject, readers searching for that subject will get there. Business models are built on this promise, and in fact, much of the Internet is built on this promise. But SEO has failed in some ways. In part, that's because SEO best practices have proven too easy to manipulate. Using hacker jargon, Navarro distinguished between “white hat” SEO, which tries to play by the rules by creating valuable content that is correctly formatted, and “black hat” SEO, which embellishes poor content with formatting tricks to manipulate search results. The excesses of the latter are accelerating SEO's demise. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence threatens to upend the entire search model. Google's recently released Gemini product aims to answer queries within the browser, so users don't have to visit an external website at all. This model seems highly likely to further reduce search traffic (the company quickly backed out of the rollout after Gemini's answers proved unreliable). Navarro likened the search engine to real-world infrastructure: “Google owns the roads. They closed our roads. They closed a bunch of roads. No one can get to where we are.”
Google recently reached out to HouseFresh, setting up a conference call between members of its search team, Navarro, and the head of Retro Dodo, an indie gaming site affected by the SEO changes. Navarro told me they tried to tell her about the dire impact that Google's algorithm changes are having on sites like hers. Navarro said Google asked HouseFresh how it researches and writes its articles, presumably to better evaluate how the algorithm should treat the site. Navarro said they apologized but didn't promise any specific changes. (A Google spokesperson told me, “We take our creators' feedback seriously and use their insights to help improve our systems.”) HouseFresh has already developed other ways to drive viewership to its content. Ironically, one of the ways they've landed is by turning text reviews of the site into videos and posting them to YouTube, a platform owned by Google. Videos tend to rank higher in search, even if the corresponding articles don't. (It's hard to escape Google, which is why the US Department of Justice recently took the company to court for monopolistic practices.) Navarro is also working with other independent websites to create DIY recommendation sites that don't rely on search engines, reminiscent of the early web's blog rolls and subject directories that served as the internet's yellow pages. “We need to start making things that are made by humans and that don't involve algorithms,” she said.
When Google was founded in 1998, its mission was to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But with the company's new products and updates, it seems content to bury the same information it once brought to the surface. What's most accessible is no longer necessarily the most relevant, and a major collapse may be looming. If website owners don't trust Google to provide traffic, and consumers don't trust Google to provide answers, are Google's search engine results really the best for everyone? “Google got us all to believe in that mission,” Navarro says. “Now I'm not even sure Google can really deliver on that mission.” They are I believe in their mission.”