While Google faces mounting pressure from Bing’s ChatGPT integration and other generative AI (genAI) search platforms, degradation of its own search results, including those shown in its AI Overviews, could be exacerbating migration away from Google.
Google’s worldwide search engine market share fell below 90.0% for the first time since 2015 in October 2024, according to Statcounter. In the same month, Bing’s search engine market share crossed the 4.0% mark for the first time since 2011, though it has dipped slightly lower since then.
As genAI content floods the internet, Google has attempted to make its search results less spammy. But those aggressive moves may not be working.
“Google has made a lot of really big moves in the last two years from an algorithm update perspective, as well as manual actions where they're very clearly trying to reduce SEO spam on the internet,” said Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at Amsive. “I don't know that Google achieved what it wanted to. I don't know that the internet is better for it."
User-generated content crowds
In the interest of prioritizing human voices over genAI ones, Google has placed added value on user-generated content, which is why results from sites like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn Pulse have been rising the SEO ranks.
These user-generated responses are not necessarily accurate, which may degrade the search experience.
Links from Reddit and Quora are appearing in AI Overviews less often than when the function launched, per BrightEdge, but the citations that are appearing aren’t necessarily reliable.
AI Overview’s accuracy issue
“Google has so many advanced systems for ranking content organically,” said Ray, including spam filters, localization filters, and manual actions. Manual actions are issued by Google against a site when a human reviewer determines that pages on that site have run afoul of Google's spam policies." So if a website's been penalized by Google, you know that article won't appear in the organic search results. But then when you go to AI Overviews, it's like all that stuff's out the window.”
Sites hit by manual actions, Google’s most extreme penalty, are showing up in AI Overviews, said Ray, who identified a Forbes article that had done just that. “That makes absolutely no sense.”
Other content surfaced by AI Overviews may be outdated or linking to pages from other countries when local information is also available.
The challenge for marketers
AI Overviews and broader updates have introduced some guesswork into SEO, but most marketers have no choice but to roll with Google’s punches.
“You have to try to start focusing on AI Overviews,” said Ray. However, how to get sourced within those Overviews is still not entirely clear.
“In theory, if you're tracking the citations in AI Overviews, you can get a good pulse for what type of article you need to write to appear in there,” Ray said. But because the results in these Overviews are still a hodgepodge, mimicking those article types is hard to do. Marketers should keep employing SEO best practices and keep experimenting on how to get into AI Overviews.
But they should also keep in mind non-Google competitors, like Bing, have seen an uptick, and make sure they stay on the pulse of other places users are searching.
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