• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 19, 2025

In recent years a growing number of SEO industry insiders and others who use Google Search and Google Ads have voiced concerns about noticeable changes and wondered whether the company’s services are broken.

During the past year or two Google’s results have declined, according to research from WalletHub, which focuses on financial services.

John S Kiernan, managing editor at WalletHub, said analysis began with personal finance content when WalletHub noticed "inferior and subpar results dominating the search query results. He said the company found international results showing up in U.S. queries like recommending credit cards in the U.S. to people who live in India.

He also pointed to the way Google took over first-page results with its own services. Kiernan said the company noticed this happening gradually over time and wondered what would cause this to happen, although most people thought of Google as a sophisticated search company.

“It led us to the conclusion that this might be somewhat intentional given what we saw from a lot of internal emails from Google executives during the monopoly trial,” he said. “It showed that Google could make their search results worse without sacrificing revenue and it showed an internal tug of war between the people who wanted high-quality results for users and people who wanted maximize ad revenue.”

Kiernan acknowledges that it is not the normal course of business for a company to make its product work. But Google is not a normal company.

When asked if this could be considered a conspiracy theory, Kiernan said “sure, based on the traditional definition. We were hesitant to pursue this road because we felt people might view this as a tinfoil hat sort of thing, but we did a lot of research and waited almost two years to release the findings.”

The evidence, which WalletHub took years to compile, was released in a report on Wednesday. It examines the quality of Google search results as well as the impact on consumers and how people view the changes. It also provides evidence for potential motives, as well as commentary from WalletHub.

“This so-called ‘analysis’ is based on flawed methodologies and recycled claims," a Google spokesperson told MediaPost in an email. "Google leads the industry in search quality, ads quality, and prominent ad labeling. We listen to feedback from users and launch thousands of improvements every year, from features like AI Overviews that users love, to our aggressive efforts to fight spam and low-quality content.”  

WalletHub suggests its data is proof that deteriorating search quality is deliberate and has pointed to documents and emails revealed as part of United States v. Google LLC (2020), the lawsuit in which Google was ruled to be a monopoly. The blog post walks through all the evidence.

Just 36% of Google searches in the U.S. make it to the open web, a site that isn’t owned by Google or paying Google ad revenue, according to WalletHub, citing SparkToro data.

Google had admitted that search drives revenue for its parent company, Alphabet, and that ads accounted for more than half of Alphabet’s revenue and nearly three-quarters of the company’s advertising revenue in 2023, according to company filings.

Some 63% of people think Google search results were better the previous year, and 66% of people think Google shows too many ads, while 35% think it shows too many irrelevant results, according to WalletHub surveys.

Only 41% of the top 10 search results meet the user’s intent, according to WalletHub’s study on credit card and banking queries, while 34% of the relevant pages appearing in the top 10 results show only advertiser products to consumers, and 58% of those results are not transparent about doing so.

There seems to be a preference for major brands, as 72% of people think Google has a bias toward big brands because rather than providing the best information, the search giant is simply returning whatever the most popular brands give them. Name recognition, not quality content, is really what’s being rewarded.

In addition, 55% of people think Google emphasizes Reddit too much in search results. It is common to see old, archived, and outdated Reddit pages that people cannot interact with or get up-to-date information from, as well as forums supposedly about something very different from the topic of the query.

It appears that Google cannot identify the most thoroughly researched, unbiased information, and search results are skewed toward big brands. The top product recommended by the first five relevant search results for banking and credit-card queries could cost consumers an average of $202, and up to $1,347.

Kiernan mentioned that WalletHub -- along with other small and mid-sized financial institutions -- have seen rankings in Google Search slip, but assured MediaPost that it only led the company to research the problem during the past few years.

He did not want it to seem like a direct grievance or a complaint over WalletHub's ranking in search results.

“We haven’t seen much cooperation from Google in the past few years,” he said. "The problem is a lot bigger than us."