The Google Record
This is a record. Every claim links to its source. No commentary, no opinion. Read it, follow the links, draw your own conclusions.
The Antitrust Record
On August 5, 2024, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly in general search and search text advertising. The ruling found that Google maintained its monopoly through exclusive distribution agreements.
Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to be the default search engine on browsers, phones, and devices. Apple received an estimated $18 billion of that.
The European Commission fined Google three times in three years:
- 2017: €2.42 billion for illegally favoring its own comparison shopping service in search results.
- 2018: €4.34 billion for imposing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers to cement Google Search dominance.
- 2019: €1.49 billion for abusing its dominance in online advertising by restricting third-party websites from displaying search ads from Google's competitors.
South Korea's Fair Trade Commission fined Google $177 million in September 2021 for blocking manufacturers from using modified versions of Android.
India's Competition Commission imposed a $162 million fine in October 2022 for anti-competitive practices related to Android.
Turkey's competition authority fined Google $75 million in December 2024 for abusing dominance in ad server services.
The Internal Evidence
In 2020, Google replaced Ben Gomes as head of Search. Gomes was an engineer who had been with Google Search since the beginning, focused on quality. His replacement was Prabhakar Raghavan, who came from Google's ads division and had previously run Yahoo's search.
Ed Zitron documented this leadership change and its consequences in "The Man Who Killed Google Search." Drawing on DOJ trial exhibits, Zitron showed how Raghavan's arrival coincided with Google's search quality team being overruled by the ads organization.
The DOJ trial exhibits revealed a 2019 "code yellow" inside Google: an emergency measure triggered when search ad revenue fell short of targets. The response was not to improve search. It was to increase the number of ads and make organic results less prominent.
In May 2024, Google launched AI Overviews in search results. Within days, users documented AI Overviews recommending glue on pizza, eating rocks for nutrition, and other dangerous misinformation. Google's AI was confident, cited-looking, and wrong.
Search Quality Deterioration
A study by researchers at Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and ScaDS.AI (published January 2024) analyzed 7,392 product review queries across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over one year. Conclusion: higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized, and lower quality. Affiliate spam dominated the results.
In February 2024, Google signed a $60 million per year content licensing deal with Reddit. The timing matters: Reddit content started appearing prominently in Google search results around the same period. Google's official position is the two are unrelated.
Parasite SEO became visible in 2023-2024. Major publishers like Forbes created "Forbes Advisor" and Fortune created "Fortune Recommends," leveraging their domain authority to rank affiliate content that had no editorial relationship to their core publications. Google announced a site reputation abuse policy in March 2024. Enforcement was delayed until November 2024, giving these operations months of additional revenue.
Impact on Independent Publishers
HouseFresh
Retrododo
Travel Lemming
These are not edge cases. In December 2024, a survey by Lily Ray and Marie Haynes documented hundreds of independent sites still unrecovered from the September 2023 update. The common thread: original content, real expertise, small teams with no corporate backing.
The personal accounts behind these numbers are worth reading.
The Ad Machine
Google Search generated $198.1 billion in advertising revenue in fiscal year 2024. That represents approximately 57% of Alphabet's total revenue.
SparkToro's research, led by Rand Fishkin, found that approximately 58.5% of Google searches in 2024 ended in zero clicks, meaning users never left Google's ecosystem. Google answered the query itself (or showed enough information to satisfy it), capturing the value of the content it indexed without sending traffic to the source.
The organic search result, the reason most people used Google in the first place, occupies a shrinking fraction of the page. The rest is ads, AI Overviews, shopping carousels, knowledge panels, "People also ask," and other Google-owned modules.
The Accountability Gap
Alphabet employed 182,502 people as of December 31, 2024. None of them are reachable by a publisher whose business was destroyed by a search update. There is no support email. No phone number. No appeals process.
Google's public-facing search representative, Danny Sullivan (@searchliaison), has repeatedly acknowledged frustration from affected publishers while offering no mechanism for review or correction.
Google's own "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content" documentation advises site owners to focus on quality, expertise, and user value. The sites documented above followed this guidance. They were penalized anyway.
Timeline
Every event sourced above, merged chronologically.
This is the third piece in a series about Google and search. The personal side: How My Life Got 100x Better When I Stopped Thinking About Google. What I saw happen: I Watched Google Kill Their Websites.
