Brand advertisers are reviewing their organic and paid search strategies in response to web users turning away from Google.
Google’s market share decrease belies big changes in the way that users search for information online. Today’s consumers use a wider variety of search tools than they did in previous years, from TikTok to Perplexity to Amazon, depending on their goals. Research published by Omnicom in January suggested clients accordingly consider investing their search across a more diverse set of channels.
Because the tech giant has been synonymous with search, it’s the player with the most to lose — but advertisers are on the hook, too. A spokesperson for Google didn’t immediately return a request for comment on this story.
According to nine media buyers and SEO experts who spoke with Digiday, brand marketers are beginning to notice the impact of changes in search behavior. In response, some are altering investment plans and asking their agencies to rethink their organic search presence, or appointing new shops to SEO briefs.
SEO has gone from being “the last thing brands thought about” to a key lever in clients’ response to a changing search environment, said Catherine Lux, head of SEO at Assembly.
This month Assembly recently expanded its brief with Brooks Running to include SEO in Europe — its North American business already handled paid media for the footwear brand — while media agency PMG’s European business picked up meal subscription service Gousto as a client.
“We are seeing more clients unlocking extra budget for new projects and different ways of working,” said Lux.
Agency execs say that work often translates to auditing client websites to ensure they’re easier for LLMs to scan: adding clearly structured data, fewer standalone landing pages, blog posts or pages featuring concise FAQs, more bylined blogs and more material that mirrors the conversational tone used by AI chatbots and search tools.
“We need that cohesive site content that is super up to date and relevant and chock full of all of the keywords that folks want to be serving on for organic,” said Grace Mante, director of media agency Kepler’s Search Center of Excellence.
Much of this work is already considered best practice by agencies, but they’re now emphasizing its importance — the idea being, that an optimized digital presence can better influence the way that Gemini or ChatGPT can “read” a client’s content, and the way they reflect a brand back to a user.
“Great SEO is what is going to inform the large language models,” said Matt Allfrey, head of SEO, EMEA at PMG.
And what of advertisers’ spending on paid search? According to some media buyers, they’re shifting it into other pockets of marketing investment. Both social platforms and retail media networks provide tempting destinations (eMarketer estimated that Walmart’s search ad business would expand 30.4% last year, for example).
In some cases, that means investment in different Google products. Mante said Kepler clients were prioritizing Google’s Performance Max and Demand Gen ad formats, though she didn’t provide spend estimates.
YouTube could be another beneficiary. According to Chris Actis, president of agency True Media, while spend assigned for local or regionally targeted search ads had held steady, the agency had begun to shift client investment out of brand search (the practice of placing ads against keyword searches or brand-name searches) and into other channels. “Brand search is an opportunity for marketers to shift [spend],” Actis said.
He said that in 2024, an unnamed travel client shifted half of its branded search spend into digital display and video inventory, principally YouTube.
Given the rising cost of search ads — both IPG’s Magna media investment unit and PMG’s Allfrey estimated that brand CPCs have risen 6% year-on-year — that’s not been too difficult an argument to make. For other clients, that cash is going where users have gone — to paid search ads on TikTok, Reddit or Instagram.
Måns Gårdfeldt, partner at indie digital agency Spekk, estimated that his agency’s clients had reduced their spending on brand search by 10-20%, prompted by a reduction in search engine usage, and transferred their investments into paid social. “Social search will only grow, in my book,” he said.
Dan Roberts, Assembly head of search and programmatic, said the agency’s clients were devoting “incremental” budgets to experimental channels, such as paid ads on Perplexity, as they considered their course changes; he didn’t provide budget estimates.
While Google’s market share fall may yet prove to be a blip, it’s likely a sign of different online habits taking hold among web users.
The migration to AI search tools and social platforms points to demand for a different online experience — one with the conversation, not the directory, as its bedrock. According to Dan Toplitt, svp, head of search and digital experience at Kinesso, it calls into question “what search actually is.”
In that context, both SEO, paid search and social will likely need to work in closer concert rather than as separate disciplines. Toplitt concluded that the challenge calls for a “more holistic” approach to those channels, and for brand marketers to consider how each one dovetails the other.