Is ‘find results on’ other sites still an ongoing experiment for the European Google local SERPs?

Last year we noticed another attempt from Google to find a solution to prevent a formal local search antitrust complaint. January 2020 and this ‘experiment’ is still on the go.

New SERPs which include some of our sites appear in Germany, Spain, and France. They prompt users to try alternative directories or search engines for the same local query.

Google’s Ongoing Antitrust Efforts

While we appreciate their intention to improve the search, this is likely part of Google’s ongoing effort to comply with the European Commission’s antitrust decision in shopping search.

This ‘new link placement’ is very similar to their approach back in 2013 and 2014 and it’s still not the most user-friendly placement. These kinds of changes to the SERP are cosmetic and have an insignificant impact on traffic.

The Impact of Rival Links

Yelp argues the latest rival links proposal receives a marginal percentage of clicks (~5%), while Google’s capture of web traffic has increased by ~20% since the original proposal over five years ago.

Antitrust Backstory

Since 2017, when the European Commission fined Google for “abusing its dominant position” in shopping search, Google implemented changes to provide theoretically equal treatment for rival engines. The ‘rival links’ approach was criticized as insufficient to generate meaningful traffic for competitors.

It seems that Google is still eating more and more of the web in order to steer traffic to itself.