According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.

The drop represents a more than 4% decrease from the previous month, marking the largest single-month decline on record.

U.S. Market Impact

The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.

Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.

Concurrently, competitors Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have seen gains. Bing reached a 13% market share in the U.S. and 5.8% globally, its highest since launching in 2009.

Yahoo Search’s worldwide share nearly tripled to 3.06%, a level not seen since July 2015.

Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.

Search Quality Concerns

Many industry experts have recently expressed concerns about the declining quality of Google’s search results.

A portion of the SEO community believes that the search giant’s results have worsened following the latest update.

These concerns have begun to extend to average internet users, who are increasingly voicing complaints about the state of their search results.

Alternative Perspectives

Web analytics platform SimilarWeb provided additional context on X (formerly Twitter), stating that its data for the US for March 2024 suggests Google’s decline may not be as severe as initially reported.

From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb

— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024

SimilarWeb also highlighted Yahoo’s strong performance, categorizing it as a News and Media platform rather than a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category.

Don’t underestimate Yahoo. They’re doing great. On our platform they’re categorized as News and Media, and hence not a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category. But they rank #10 worldwide, #6 in the US, and #1 in their category. Much higher than Bing and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/O4yJu5QEK6

— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024

At the same time, Google is slightly declining 👀 pic.twitter.com/9i7paeU1QG

— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024

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Why It Matters

The shifting search engine market trends can impact businesses, marketers, and regular users.

Google has been on top for a long time, shaping how we find things online and how users behave.

However, as its market share drops and other search engines gain popularity, publishers may need to rethink their online strategies and optimize for multiple search platforms besides Google.

Users are becoming vocal about Google’s declining search quality over time. As people start trying alternate search engines, the various platforms must prioritize keeping users satisfied if they want to maintain or grow their market position.

It will be interesting to see how they respond to this boost in market share.

What It Means for SEO Pros

As Google’s competitors gain ground, SEO strategies may need to adapt by accounting for how each search engine’s algorithms and ranking factors work.

This could involve diversifying SEO efforts across multiple platforms and staying up-to-date on best practices for each one.

The increased focus on high-quality search results emphasizes the need to create valuable, user-focused content that meets the needs of the target audience.

SEO pros must prioritize informative, engaging, trustworthy content that meets search engine algorithms and user expectations.

Remain flexible, adaptable, and proactive to navigate these shifts. Keeping a pulse on industry trends, user behaviors, and competing search engine strategies will be key for successful SEO campaigns.

Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock

When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach. 

Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media). 

However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail. 

It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy. 

So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.

Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF. 

We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.

Key takeaways from this webinar:

• Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
• How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos. 
• The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.

Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.

Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.

You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.

And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar. 

It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.

HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.

Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.

They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.

So why does this happen?

There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.

As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:

• extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
• content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
• growing misalignment between search and content teams.
• a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.

Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.

There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.

It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.

Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.

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There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:

Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?

Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?

Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?

As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…

…but they don’t need to.

Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.

These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:

• Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
• Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
• Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.

These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.

What about topical authority?

“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”

I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:

Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.

There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.

In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.

On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.

Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…

But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.

This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.

These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.

You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:

These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.

They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.

They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.

Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.

SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.

Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.

Final thoughts

This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.