Howdy Folks, I’m Dan O, Senior Search Strategist here at Overit Media, and this is the Overit SEO Brief. This Brief is for Q4 2024 and we’re going to provide updates on some topics we’ve covered in some recent Briefs, with a particular focus on the importance of diversifying your SEO strategies in a rapidly fragmenting search landscape.
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Topic 1: Google Faces Second Antitrust Trial After Losing Its First
In a prior SEO Brief, we covered the first trial that Google faced from the federal Justice Department for antitrust violations of the Sherman Act. In August, Google lost that trial, as Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google used monopolistic practices to entrench its market share in the search space, including behind the scenes payments to phone manufacturers that locked in Google as a default search engine. In the wake of that outcome, opening arguments began in September for a second antitrust trial, this time for Google’s business practices within the digital advertising and ad tech space.
Justice Department lawyers have already presented similar arguments to Judge Leonie Brinkema, arguing that Google first violated antitrust laws through its acquisition of the ad software platform DoubleClick nearly 15 years ago. With DoubleClick, Google was able to seize an outsized share of the digital advertising market by securing payments and fees both from publishers who wished to sell ad space on their websites AND the various companies who wished to purchase such ad space.
They also forced multiple parties to use their ad auction technology and placed barriers to using competing ad auction platforms and markets. This “double-dipping” on both sides of the ad markets not only inflated the prices of digital advertising across the web but was compared in a revealed email from a former Google employee to allowing “a major bank to own the New York Stock Exchange”.
Google lawyers are currently making their counterarguments, and we can expect closing arguments sometime in November 2024, with Judge Brinkema to make a ruling sometime in early 2025.
The Justice Department has already stated they’d like specific remedies to include breaking up and selling off key assets for Alphabet, the umbrella corporation Google reorganized under more than a decade ago. These are some of the same remedies requested in the initial trial under Judge Mehta, so the stakes here are very high for Google and the entire digital advertising space.
For those who have taken Google’s dominance in these spaces as a given, it might be time to reconsider those default assumptions and imagine a more fragmented and diversified landscape, with the barrier for entry by other competitors greatly reduced but the dominance of any one in question.
Topic 2: ChatGPT to Integrate SearchGPT by the End of Year
Also in a prior Brief, we covered the initial soft launch of SearchGPT, a type of digital search experience offered by the Open AI group that’s most well-known for its popular ChatGPT platform. SearchGPT combines generative AI technology with the ability to search the open web and provide relevant and current citations from the internet within the generated replies.
The very initial launch was open to only a limited number of participants through an email-based waiting list, but Open AI recently made an announcement that they plan to fully integrate SearchGPT directly within ChatGPT as a feature by the end of 2024 and open up its capabilities to a much wider base of users.
With nearly 200 million Active Monthly Users, ChatGPT is already the most widely adopted AI platform used, and the addition of Generative Search could potentially increase its market share and fight off competition from similar competitors in AI based search such as Google Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft CoPilot.
While not as many people use AI based search as they do generative AI at large, and traditional search engines still dominate the space, it’s still very early on in the broader technology adoption cycle. This rather quick move by Open AI leadership suggests they’re not going to wait around and are looking to aggressively move into Generative Search to widen their user base. We’ll have to see when SearchGPT fully integrates with ChatGPT, but we can expect 2025 to be an interesting year, particularly in the wake of the aforementioned clouds looming for Google.
Topic 3: TikTok Partners with Amazon for Expanded In-App Ecomm Purchases
And in our final topic for this Brief, TikTok quietly announced a partnership with Amazon that allows users to purchase products through Amazon directly in the TikTok platform. While they had already introduced in-app purchasing before through their TikTok Shop feature, the partnership with Amazon greatly expands their potential vendor base and should improve its overall value and capabilities for businesses, particularly those who already sell products through Amazon.
TikTok first launched around 2016 into 2017 and has steadily grown to over 1 billion Monthly Active Users worldwide, making it one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet today. Their demographic does skew younger, with the bulk of users under 30, but at 8 years old already, TikTok’s user base is also getting older every year and coming into higher levels of disposable income with an increased range of expenditures and purchases. This younger generation does not automatically default or defer to traditional search engines the way older generational cohorts have and many of them use social media to search for information and recommendations on goods and services. For this younger demographic now coming into their own, social is the new search.
In a related vein, YouTube also has in-app purchase capabilities through YouTube Shopping and video shorts and reels have become ubiquitous on Instagram and Facebook. All of this is to say that if you aren’t doing short form video content, you really should start considering it, particularly if you’re in eCommerce.
Short form video works well both for organic content posting and targeted ad placement, and videos can easily be cross published across a range of platforms. As traditional search engines like Google face increased scrutiny from regulators and the younger generations begin turning more to AI and social media-based platforms, the entire search landscape will continue to evolve. Begin exploring and experimenting NOW, while the barriers to entry and overall competition are still low and find some recipes for success you can later scale up for sustainable growth.
Ok folks, that’s it for this Brief. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you in 2025. Bye!!