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Places Sites Go West, Google's Best Efforts, Chrome Click Surveillance

Greg Sterling

Places Sites Go West, Google's Best Efforts, Chrome Click Surveillance

Places Sites Land in North America

The Places Sites carousel is one of Google's accommodations for the Digital Markets Act in Europe. It's an effort to drive more traffic to directories and aggregators. Now Places Sites have apparently come to North America (Canada, US). Near Media has found in three European user-research projects, in different verticals, that the vast majority of people do not click on these modules and they don't drive meaningful traffic to publishers (see, e.g., Hotels, Restaurants). There are some very (capital V) isolated exceptions where well-known brands are present (e.g., TripAdvisor, Booking.com). It's not entirely clear why Google is importing this feature to North America, except perhaps that it wants to harmonize the SERP across markets. Google may also want to point to Places Sites to head off DMA-style regulations in the US: "see we're not self-preferencing." Places Sites is really an updating of the old "rival links" approach that Google proposed to try and preempt EU antitrust action, but was ultimately abandoned.

Source: ChatGPT

Our take:

  • Our research has found that, even in organic positions 1 or 2, Places Sites see very few clicks.
  • In our most recent Hotel vertical research the Hotel Finder and Maps drove 28x the number of clicks of Places Sites, which saw just 7 out of 601 total clicks.
  • User reactions to Places Sites in North America are likely to be similarly indifferent but we won't know for sure until we do some testing.

Google: We're Just Doing Our Best

On the heels of last months' Barry Schwartz interview of Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan comes a new interview with SEO Aleyda Solis (video below). And they cover much of the same territory. Solis asks questions about core updates, brand preferencing, forums and UGC, Gen Z use of social over Google, AI Overviews and the future of SEO. Regarding brands outranking smaller sites, Sullivan says Google doesn't explicitly prefer brands; it's trying to surface the most relevant and useful content regardless of the source (Navboost and CTR weren't discussed). On the topic of forums and UGC, Sullivan acknowledges the use of TikTok and other sites as search alternatives, but says that Google is showing hundreds of UGC sources and forums to offer the most "authentic" results available and implies Google does a better job of this than social sites. He definitively says no Search Console reporting on AIOs. He concludes with the statement that he has no predictions about the future of search other than it's perpetually changing. As for SEO, Sullivan provides familiar advice: produce quality content rather than trying to game the system. Eventually, he says, your sincerely produced good content will rank – eventually.

Our take:

  • As mentioned, the interview doesn't discuss clicks or engagement as ranking signals. (Barry's interview did a bit.) See Cindy Krum's argument below.
  • Why known brands rank: because people click on them and Google uses those clicks to determine relevance. It's not that simple but ... it also sort of is.
  • Very often, UGC material is of limited (or no) relevance IMO. One reason for the prevalence of forums is to win back Gen Z.
  • The gist of this interview: put away your SEO cynicism, we're doing our best but we're not perfect; great content will win in the end. Or will it?

Chrome Click Surveillance

In stark contrast to the above, Cindy Krum offers a blistering critique of Google's undisclosed use of Chrome clickstream data to fuel and improve its algorithms. We know it does this from the previous Search API leak. Indeed, tracking users was allegedly part of the rationale behind Chrome. In the video below, Krum argues that Chrome captured virtually everything users did after clicking through from the Google SERP, whether signed-in or incognito. There's discussion of technical issues – JavaScript rendering, Chrome histograms, back-forward cache (BF cache), "no-store" HTTP headers and Core Web Vitals – and their role in data collection and user surveillance. All of these efforts, Krum argues, are part of a broader strategy to collect as much data as possible, for search and ad-model optimization. She asserts this non-consensual tracking and data collection has enabled Google to monopolize the search and advertising markets by giving it a significant data advantage over competitors. Accordingly, Chrome's market dominance supports and reinforces Google's search dominance. She further argues this behavior is likely illegal in the EU, under its more restrictive consent-based privacy regulations. Cue the investigations and litigation.

Our take:

  • Krum was a previous guest on the Near Media podcast, where we talked about the role of clicks and behavioral signals in Google's ranking algorithm.
  • Recently a US appellate court revived a privacy class action against Google that alleges Chrome users' personal data was captured without permission.
  • Google has been repeatedly sued and fined for deceptive privacy practices over the past 15 years and paid more than $800 million in penalties/settlements.
  • The totality of evidence argues that Google has used ethically questionable, if not illegal, practices to maximize revenue and maintain search dominance.

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