As you have heard by now, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against Google on August 5, claiming that the search engine giant has operated in a monopolistic fashion. So now what? How will the ruling affect the operations of SEO agencies, Google Ads specialists, and internal marketing teams?
It may not matter at all. We share our thoughts below, and if you’d like to speak with a leading law firm SEO agency or weigh in on this antitrust ruling, send us a note.
Will Google’s Antitrust Ruling Affect Search Marketers At All?
Certainly not for several years, and possibly not at all. Google is going to drag this out as long as possible through the appeals process, and that may take up to five years.
The Crux of the Issue: Default Browsers
This entire case exists because Google pays Apple about $20B per year to maintain its status as the default search engine on iPhones. Again, it will probably take at least five years from now for any meaningful decision to be reached, and when that time comes (assuming Google is still found to operate as a monopoly), it may only be a fine. IF Google is required to rescind its status as the iPhone’s default browser, we may start to see meaningful changes to our day-to-day operations as search marketers.
How Impactful is Search Traffic From iPhones?
The iPhone’s browser is Safari. To quickly measure its importance, we looked at organic traffic statistics from two very different websites for July, 2024.
First was a large personal injury law firm. In July, 2024, we tracked:
- 9,509 total users (this firm is not running PPC campaigns)
- 4748 came from Chrome (mostly Google’s search engine)
- 3,370 came from Safari (mostly Google’s search engine)
- 421 came from Edge (Bing)
- 121 came from Firefox (who knows, who cares)
Here was the breakdown of traffic from organic search, divided by search engine:
- 6,649 users from Google Organic Search
- 497 users from Bing Organic Search
- Yahoo – who cares
- DuckDuckGo: 63 users from Organic Search
The second website we measured was a large adventure travel company’s website. The stats for July 2024:
- 9457 users
- 4568 users Chrome
- 4043 Safari
- 354 Edge
- Firefox 226
And the breakdown by search engine:
- 9.028 Google organic
- 165 Bing organic
- Yahoo – literally nobody cares
- DuckDuckGo – 90
So yes, if the government demands that Google give up its status as the iPhone’s default browser, the fallout would be immense for search marketers.
Will the Antitrust Ruling Affect the SEO Community?
No, there won’t be any impact on the SEO community. Right now, we focus our efforts on Google search – and even if Apple started using Bing as its default search engine tomorrow, the statistics we shared above indicate that Google would still be the market leader in search.
That said, every search engine tries to show results that are authoritative (has backlinks etc.), have deep content, generate positive user interactions and so forth. If you dominate Google Search, you likely dominate Bing as well. Other than the fact that you may have to spend a bit more time in the Bing Maps interface or something like that, your actual workflow will not change at all.
Will the Antitrust Ruling Affect PPC Campaigns?
This gets a bit spicier. If Google loses significant market share, then those of us who run PPC campaigns will have to engage more more with Microsoft Ads, DuckDuckGo and maybe even other browsers. But it still isn’t that big of a deal. If a client wants to spend $50K/mo on Google, but the search volume is no longer there, you’ll just start spending $25K on Google and $25K on Microsoft Ads. The only downside is that you have to deal with the substandard product that is Microsoft Ads.
So if you are feeling a bit nervous – remember that you still have multiple years to dust off your Microsoft Ads chops. And it’s really not that hard to import your Google Ads campaigns and optimize them for Microsoft.
What About Apple’s Impending Search Engine Launch?
This is not a thing! Every so often there is a new article about how Apple is thinking about a search engine. Even this past fall, Search Engine Land reiterated the point that Apple has no reason incentive to build a search engine.
Here’s a wonderful comment from a Reddit thread from two years ago:
Apple is making an unbelievable amount of money (in mostly pure profit) by using Google as the default search engine. Do you think DuckDuckGo or Yahoo can pay them $20B to be the default engine? No. Does Microsoft want to spend that much money on search when they have so many other more profitable revenue streams? Probably not.
So Apple doesn’t have any incentive to launch a search engine.
Other Search Engines Are Still Insignificant
The NPR article about the antitrust case quotes DuckDuckGo VP Kamyl Bazbaz. She states,
“The journey ahead will be long. However, we know there is a pent up demand for alternatives in search and this ruling will support access to more options.”
DuckDuckGo is a nice little company based in the Philly ‘burbs, close to Majux’s home office. So no offense to them – but DuckDuckGo sends less search traffic to our client websites than Yahoo does. And do you even know a single person who uses Yahoo? Probably not.
Furthermore, that quote highlights the fact that the people who use DuckDuckGo are the ones with the “pent up demand for alternatives.” There is no pent-up demand – indie folks who don’t want to use Google already have their alternatives, and it’s DuckDuckGo or Bing. Furthermore, most people who don’t want Google’s organic results already append their searches with “Reddit.”
To Summarize, The Antitrust Ruling Doesn’t Matter For Search Marketers
The search community has no reason to panic. Even heavy sanctions won’t come for several years. If they do come at all, we will simply start measuring performance on Bing and DuckDuckGo more often.
The only threat to search marketers is user behavior. If people stopped using search engines to find services, products and information, our industry would suffer. But not even the hoopla surrounding ChatGPT has made a dent in the popularity of search engines.
As long as consumers are searching for things online, the search industry will have work to do.
