Behavioral Changes Online
Where things are going
If you caught my latest news roundup, you saw that one of the links was to an interview with Liz Reid, Google’s Head of Search.
The most interesting part (really the only interesting part) was when she talked about how user behavior is changing vis-a-vis what type of content people are looking for online.
From the interview:
Christopher Mims: There have been multiple reports that since Google launched AI Overviews, click throughs have fallen. Now, you talked earlier about your aggregate data. You aren’t seeing this phenomenon as far as I understand it, but I’ve talked to individual publishers who said that with the last algorithm update, they saw traffic drop 45%. Are we conflating two things here because Google does regularly update the search rankings and the sort of underlying algorithm that determines where publishers are going to be and how much traffic they’re going to get? Or is it that while you’re seeing overall click-through rates in aggregate for Google stay the same, for individual publishers, it’s spiky and there are winners and there are losers in the AI Overview era?
Liz Reid: So I would say a couple of things. One of the things that’s always true about Google Search is that you make changes and there are winners and losers. That’s true on any ranking update. That doesn’t in any way discount what it means for those individual publishers that are losers. But the other thing that’s going on is there’s a behavioral shift that is happening in conjunction with the move to AI, and that is a shift of who people are going to for a set of questions. And they are going to short-form video, they are going to forums, they are going to user-generated content a lot more than traditional sites. This is particularly true with younger users. They’re going to podcasts-
Tim Higgins: Thank God.
Liz Reid: Rather than reading the long article.
Tim Higgins: Bold Names, where you get your ideas.
Liz Reid: So people have searched on this, and this is particularly with youth, they show this even more. And they do that at some level for news, but often for things that the world doesn’t necessarily think of as hard news, but publishers are used to thinking about. Where are you getting your lifestyle advice? Where are you getting your cooking? Are you getting your cooking recipes from a newspaper? Are you getting your cooking recipes from YouTube? And so there’s all these underlying dynamics as well. And we are seeing a shift that is people going to more of these forums, user-generated content, short-form video, audio, podcasts, and that is coming at the expense of some other more long-form traditional web. And so that’s oftentimes what people are seeing. You can say in an aggregate, an individual publisher could be affected by any number of different factors going on. Maybe there was a different publisher that was higher ranking, maybe users change. But we do have to respond to who users want to hear from. We are in the business of both giving them high quality information but information that they seek out. And so we have over time adjusted our ranking to surface more of this content in response to what we’ve heard from users.
Christopher Mims: So to be clear, there’s a push and there’s a pull. So the pull is users want more of this kind of content, short-form video. Let’s use that as a shorthand for all the different types of media that you just named. But there’s also a push. You’re changing your algorithm because you see the trend going there?
Liz Reid: You see it from users. We do everything from user research to we run an experiment. And so you take feedback from what you hear from research about what users want, you then test it out, and then you see how users actually act. And then based on how users act, the system then starts to learn and adjust as well.
This is partially true and partially a copout.
How it a copout?
Because many publishers were completely wiped out literally overnight back in 2023. It wasn’t a behavioral change that caused the decimation (human behavior doesn’t change that fast), it was a Google algorithm update.
But she also speaks a lot of truth.
The average web user isn’t reading long articles on websites anymore.