If you’re wondering if Google search is not as good as it used to be, you’re not alone. Try searching for anything meaningful these days—a product review, a technical question, even basic factual information—and you’ll likely find yourself swimming through a sea of AI-generated spam, affiliate marketing garbage, and Reddit threads that somehow rank higher than actual expert sources. Want proof? Try doing the same search on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Searx, or even Yandex. The results are often vastly different, and increasingly, they’re better.

What you’re witnessing isn’t just your imagination or nostalgia for simpler times. It’s the documented collapse of what was once the internet’s most trusted gatekeeper, and the cause isn’t some inevitable decay of the web. It’s corporate panic, greed, and a series of deliberate decisions that prioritized short-term revenue over the very quality that made Google indispensable in the first place.

The Death Spiral Is Real—And It’s Measurable

I’ll admit something upfront: I’ve been a big fan of Google and their innovative ways of doing things for years. The company that organized the world’s information and made it universally accessible deserved the praise it received. But I can no longer voice the same enthusiasm, and it’s not just because of nostalgic attachment to the “good old days.”

For years, complaints about Google’s declining search quality were dismissed as anecdotal grumbling from SEO obsessives and tech nerds. Not anymore. A comprehensive year-long study by researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics has provided the smoking gun: search results have been systematically “taken over by low quality, trashy SEO content” with “significant amounts” being “outright SEO product review spam.”

The numbers are damning. The accuracy of search results has decreased by approximately 10% compared to previous years, while the speed of results has slowed by an average of 0.5 seconds. That might not sound like much, but in the instant-gratification world of search, it’s an eternity. More troubling, higher-ranked pages are “more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality.”

The study found strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward “simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.” In other words, Google isn’t just failing to filter out junk—it’s actively promoting it.

The researchers didn’t mince words about the scope of the problem: “A torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results.” When academic researchers start using words like “torrent” and “drowning,” you know we’re past the point of minor quality hiccups.

The Smoking Gun: When Revenue Eclipsed Results

The most damaging evidence of Google’s decline comes not from external critics, but from Google’s own internal communications. Thanks to the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit, we now have access to emails that reveal the ugly truth behind Google’s transformation from search innovator to advertising predator.

In 2019, internal emails show top Google executives from Search, Chrome, and Ads “hatching plans for pumping up ad revenues,” with the Search team explicitly working with the Ads team to “accelerate a launch of a new mobile layout” that would be “very revenue positive.” The executives didn’t just discuss revenue targets—they talked about how missing those targets would impact “the huge impact on our sales team” and their own personal wealth from stock prices.

This is the moment Google’s soul died. One executive wrote: “The question we are all faced with is how badly do we want to hit our number this quarter? We need to make this choice ASAP. I care more about revenue than the average person but think we can all agree that for all of our teams trying to live in high cost areas another [redacted] in stock price loss will not be great for morale.”

Think about that for a moment. The people responsible for organizing the world’s information were sitting around discussing how to manipulate search results to pad their quarterly numbers and personal stock portfolios. They even discussed “how not meeting their revenue goals will impact their personal wealth.”

This directly contradicts years of public denials. As recently as 2015, Google’s John Mueller insisted there was “a very, very strong firewall essentially between the paid side of Google and the organic search side,” claiming Google would never “make algorithms that make the search results worse so that people go and click on ads more.”

The emails prove that firewall was either non-existent or deliberately breached. As one observer noted, “it’s shocking that anyone involved with Google’s algorithm is in a discussion with the ChromeOS and Advertising teams about ways to artificially increase search queries in order to help meet the advertising side’s performance goals.”

The AI Panic That Broke Google

Google’s quality crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. It accelerated dramatically after the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which sent shockwaves through Mountain View. For the first time since its early days, Google faced an existential threat to its search monopoly. The company’s response reveals everything wrong with its current priorities.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT search in late 2024, it positioned itself as a direct competitor to Google by offering “fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources” that users “would have previously needed to go to a search engine for.” Unlike Google’s cluttered results pages filled with ads and AI-generated summaries, ChatGPT search offers “clear, ad-free, conversational responses” with a “streamlined, user-friendly experience.”

The contrast is stark. Recent side-by-side comparisons show Bing delivering “clean and relevant” results “right at the top” with “reputable sources,” while Google serves up a confusing mixture of sponsored content, AI overviews, and forum discussions.

Google’s panic response has been to double down on the very strategies that caused its decline. Instead of improving core search quality, the company has invested billions in flashy AI features that often make results worse, not better. The new AI Overview feature, for instance, has become infamous for suggesting users put glue on pizza and other obviously wrong answers.

The Reddit Invasion: When Forums Became “Authoritative”

Perhaps no single change better illustrates Google’s decline than its bizarre decision to flood search results with Reddit and forum content. In 2023, 1% of all queries included Reddit, and the platform now ranks suspiciously high on the “raised” and “pinned” lists of users who can customize their search experience.

Google has started prioritizing content from forums like Reddit and Quora, often pushing them to the top of search results. The company’s justification is that “forums feature real people sharing genuine insights,” but the reality is far messier. Anyone who’s spent time on Reddit knows it’s as likely to feature uninformed opinions, deliberate misinformation, and corporate astroturfing as genuine expertise.

The Reddit partnership goes deeper than just algorithmic preference. Google partnered with Reddit for faster indexing, and Reddit Answers is now powered by Google’s Gemini AI. This cozy relationship means Google has a financial incentive to keep promoting Reddit content, regardless of its actual quality or relevance.

During Reddit’s blackouts, Google visibly panicked, signaling how much it relies on the platform. That dependency reveals just how far Google has strayed from its original mission. The company that once organized the world’s information now depends on a social media platform known for chaos and controversy to fill its search results.

The Spam Economy That Google Built

The deeper problem isn’t just that Google’s search quality has declined—it’s that Google has created economic incentives that actively reward low-quality content. The company’s advertising-dependent business model has turned the internet into a spam-generation machine, and Google is both the primary beneficiary and the primary victim.

The study found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing,” with much of that content being “at least assisted by AI, if not completely generated by it.” These aren’t accidents or edge cases—they’re the predictable result of a system that rewards clicks and engagement over accuracy and usefulness.

Google’s business model creates what researchers call “enshittification”—companies “abuse their users to make things better for their business customers before they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

The numbers tell the story. Google Ads generated $237.855 billion in revenue in 2023, an increase of 365.74% over the last decade. Advertising accounts for the majority of Google’s revenue, which amounted to a total of 305.63 billion dollars in 2023. When you’re making that kind of money from advertising, the temptation to prioritize ad revenue over search quality becomes overwhelming.

The strategy is insidious: “The longer you’re on the page, the more ads Google can serve you. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you might just rephrase your search query and try again. This gives Google yet another opportunity to serve you with a new set of ads.”

The Competition Google Doesn’t Want You to Notice

While Google has been busy protecting its advertising empire, competitors have been quietly building better search experiences. The differences are striking when you actually test them side by side.

Users who switch to Bing often find it offers “at least” parity with Google, with “results that are clean and relevant” and better integration of news sources. DuckDuckGo has built a loyal following by focusing on privacy and ad-free results. Startpage combines Google’s index with privacy protection, while Searx offers completely open-source search aggregation. Even international alternatives like Yandex often deliver more relevant results for certain queries than Google’s spam-filled pages.

The specialized search engines are even more compelling. Brave Search promises a “privacy-focused surfing experience” with its own independent index. Perplexity has raised over $400 million by offering AI-enhanced search that actually cites sources properly. For users willing to pay for quality, options like Kagi represent everything Google used to be—”high quality search results that aren’t influenced by advertising keywords whatsoever” along with features Google will “likely never implement,” like the ability to block domains, prioritize certain websites, or group together low-quality content types.

The existence of these alternatives—from mainstream options like Bing and DuckDuckGo to specialized engines like Brave, Perplexity, and Kagi—proves that better search is possible. Google just chooses not to provide it. Kagi maintains “a public leaderboard of websites that users most commonly block or prioritize,” providing transparent insight into what people actually want from search results. It’s a level of user-centric design that Google abandoned years ago.

Google’s Fake Recovery Efforts

Google isn’t blind to the criticism. The company has launched a series of algorithm updates supposedly designed to combat spam and improve quality. The March 2024 core update claimed it would “reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search” by 40%. Similar promises accompanied updates throughout 2023 and 2024.

But these efforts are largely cosmetic. The German researchers found that while “Google’s updates in particular are having a noticeable, yet mostly short-lived, effect,” the improvements are temporary at best: “Eventually, SEO spammers find new ways to bypass the system.”

One of the biggest complaints after the March 2024 update was that “websites that had taken a big hit from the Helpful Content Update last fall and had worked to improve their content quality did not see improvement in search rankings.” In other words, Google was punishing good actors while continuing to reward spam.

The aftermath was brutal, with “some websites experiencing losses of over 60% in organic search traffic” and “hundreds of sites deindexed for allegedly violating Google’s guidelines.” The update seemed to target quality content creators while leaving AI-generated spam largely untouched.

The Monopoly Protection Racket

Understanding Google’s decline requires recognizing what the company is really optimizing for: not search quality, but monopoly protection. Despite all the quality problems, Google still receives “373 times as many searches as ChatGPT” and “grew 20% year over year.”

This market dominance gives Google the luxury of degrading its product without immediate consequences. An internal Google study from 2020 found that degrading search quality by a significant margin for three months resulted in “minuscule revenue losses.” The company learned it could make search worse without immediate financial punishment.

But there are signs this invulnerability is cracking. About 42% of users now find search engines like Google less useful, according to recent surveys. Users are increasingly turning to “social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram” for certain types of searches, while alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo are “becoming popular for specific types of searches.”

The shift is generational. OpenAI is “focusing particularly on young users (under 30) worldwide” who are more willing to try alternatives and less locked into Google’s ecosystem. These users didn’t grow up assuming Google was synonymous with search, making them perfect targets for competitors.

The Road to Irrelevance

Google’s search decline isn’t just a technology story—it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when monopolistic companies prioritize short-term profits over the innovations that made them dominant in the first place.

The company that once revolutionized information access by providing clean, relevant results has transformed itself into a advertising platform that happens to offer search as a side business. The modern Google search experience is “unrecognizable from the search engine I loved in 2003,” cluttered with ads and less reliable than ever.

Former Google CEO Marissa Mayer acknowledged the scope of the problem: “I do think the quality of the Internet has taken a hit. When I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively straightforward.” But Google’s problems aren’t just about scale—they’re about priorities.

The real tragedy is that Google’s decline was entirely avoidable. The company had the technical capability, the talent, and the resources to maintain search quality while building new AI features. Instead, it chose to milk its monopoly for maximum short-term gain, assuming its market position was unassailable.

That assumption is looking increasingly naive. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is “building a similar advantage” to what Google once enjoyed, “making it harder to leave—just like you’re unlikely to switch to Android after you’re deep in the Apple ecosystem.”

The Coming Reckoning

Google still commands enormous market share, but market dominance based on habit rather than quality is inherently fragile. The company’s own behavior suggests it knows this. Google has announced it will be “having more core updates more frequently,” a sign of desperation rather than confidence.

Early reviews of ChatGPT search are mixed but promising, with users noting that while it’s “still too impractical to use as my daily driver,” it offers a “glimpse of what an AI-search interface could one day look like.” More importantly, it represents something Google has abandoned: a search experience designed for users rather than advertisers.

The irony is exquisite. Google’s attempts to protect its search monopoly from AI competition by prioritizing engagement and revenue over quality may be accelerating its own obsolescence. The company that killed Yahoo, AltaVista, and countless other search engines is now vulnerable to the same fate—disruption by a genuinely superior user experience.

If you’re wondering whether Google search really has gotten worse, trust your instincts. It has, and the decline is accelerating. The question isn’t whether Google will eventually face serious competition for search dominance—it’s whether the company will recognize the threat and change course before it’s too late.

Based on its recent behavior, don’t count on it. Google has chosen its path: maximum short-term revenue extraction over long-term search excellence. That strategy may work for a few more quarters, but in the long run, it’s a recipe for irrelevance. The internet deserves better than a third-rate search engine run by a first-rate advertising company. Increasingly, it’s getting it—just not from Google.