It’s been absolutely fascinating watching the fallout from Google’s recent PR crisis, triggered by a series of extremely poor choices made by the once-beloved search giant.
To put in perspective just how bad things are getting for Google, over just the past few months, a majority of the small business community and even the SEO industry have turned against the company. This is unsurprising, considering its egregious behavior.
So what’s all the outrage about?
In a nutshell, two recent updates to the algorithm that controls what you see when you perform a search have eliminated many small businesses from the search results. But despite Google claiming these sites were removed because they were simply “low quality spam,” their content started showing up in its new AI Overviews. Essentially, Google stole the content from hundreds of millions of websites, wiped them out of the search results, and then used and monetized their stolen content.
As details started to unfold and people realized what was going on, outrage quickly grew. First, among the entrepreneurs who watched their livelihoods ripped away from them. Soon after, even many in the SEO industry, which has historically defended the search giant, began to speak out as well. The general consensus seems to be that Google is waging a war on small business.
Nate Hake, CEO and founder of TravelLemming said, “I don’t feel Google owes any website rankings, but I do have a problem with them breaking the “social contract” with the entire internet, which has historically meant users would create content, and search engines would catalog that content and send valuable traffic to it. Google exists solely because of the content others create, but the model now seems to be all about maximizing ad revenue using AI in conjunction with executing the biggest copyright theft in history.”
The company faces another problem in this crisis—AI Overviews have also destroyed trust in the company due to the wildly inaccurate answers they provide. This is critical since Google’s entire business model is built on search, and it’s currently failing at that in a huge way.
SEO consultant Adam Riemer said, “Google’s premature launch of SGE, especially on maps, has led to false and dangerous information being pushed in the search results. I started sharing examples on social media when AI Overviews first rolled out, and ended up having to delete many because I didn’t want someone to get hurt by this information. In one example, Google recommended a combination of cleaning products that would result in the creation of mustard gas—an especially brutal chemical weapon that was used in World War One.”
Keep in mind, this is all coming on the heels of the Department of Justice’s federal antitrust case, which recently uncovered mountains of evidence of deceptive and fraudulent business practices by Google’s Ads program.
"The revelations about Google Ads were absolutely shocking," said Danny Goodwin, Managing Editor of Search Engine Land. "Google inflated the bids of losers in the ad auction so the 'winner' paid even more, created an artificial form of inflation to raise costs for all advertisers and admitted to coming up with 'more fair prices, where those new prices are higher than the previous ones.' All of this was designed to increase profits for Google's parent company Alphabet and its shareholders – not to improve the ROI of advertisers and businesses or provide a better user experience."
The cherry on top, though, blindsided Google just a few days ago when Michael King, a well-known and respected SEO professional, shared and analyzed a document leaked by whistleblowers within the company. This document confirmed what many SEO practitioners have suspected for years—Google had been blatantly lying to everyone about how it works.
“It’s one thing to say ‘Hey, our algorithms are proprietary information and we can’t talk about these specific things.’ It’s another to purposely mislead people. We need a reset with Google where they can regain our trust,” said King.
While the outright theft of content was Google’s most egregious action, the revelation that its spokespeople have been lying to us may be the final nail in its coffin because Google seems to have lost the support of much of the SEO community.
Unlike in the past, it seems that a majority of SEO professionals have taken a complete 180 on Google as a result of this, which I personally have never seen. For context—I used to specialize in that industry before transitioning to public relations. I’ve been heavily involved since the late 1990s, and I’ve never seen what I’m seeing today. For people old enough to remember how hated Microsoft became in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Google appears to be in a similar position today.
Navah Hopkins, Evangelist at Optmyzr, said “Nothing drives this home like the contrast in transparency on the paid advertising side. (PPC) Where SEOs might struggle to get clear and consistent answers, those investing marketing dollars with Google get much more consistent updates and access to give feedback to product leads. A great example of this is in Ginny Marvin, Liaison for Google Ads, who constantly and patiently provides clarity on soundbites that might have been taken out of context or conflicting help documentation. That said, there has been some trust lost with advertisers due to what’s come out in DOJ antitrust trials.”
But the problem wasn’t just a number of extremely poor choices. (Let’s be honest—that number was easily in the thousands.) Equally damaging was the company’s response to the matter.
Google spokesperson, John Mueller, recently said to those whose businesses were destroyed by the update, that they should "consider that you've possibly had a good run already" and that you should apply what you've learned to "another project." And of the leak, reported by Michael King, Google reps condescendingly claimed that the documents “were taken out of context.”
Doubling down by telling your consumers that they don’t matter and they’re not smart enough to understand things in a surefire way to lose them.
When advising a client facing a PR crisis, I always tell them to first fix the problem, then take accountability with a public apology, and finally explain how they’ll ensure it doesn’t happen again. But for some reason, Google chose to take the opposite approach, which is multiplying the adverse impact of its PR crisis. This is actually not that uncommon with massive companies because their executives often develop the belief that they’re immune to the effects of a boycott. They truly believe they have built a company that is “too big to fail,” but that hubris always eventually leads to their downfall.
"There has been a lot of outrage about Google giving favoritism in commercial search results to what I call 'hollowed-out carcasses of legacy brands' – think: Deadspin, Money, Rolling Stone – that are trying to squeeze out every ounce of brand value remaining to drive affiliate revenue," Goodwin added. "Many could argue that Google itself, in 2024, has become a hollowed-out carcass of a legacy brand. Google used to be about making the best search product. Now it feels like Google is all about monetizing Search to death to make the most profit."
For once in its history, the company now appears to be facing an existential threat. Don’t get the wrong idea though—Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s a behemoth, with deep pockets, multiple streams of revenue, and a stranglehold on multiple industries. But with users losing trust in its search results, business owners losing trust in its marketing channels, and consumers losing trust in its products, the company will begin to lose revenue, and then losses in market share will follow. In the meantime, entrepreneurs need to take steps to reduce or eliminate their dependence on traffic from Google.
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Jeremy Knauff is an entrepreneur, author, and the founder of the PR firm, Spartan Media.
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