Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Junior SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Google wants to improve usage of its mobile app to continue dominating search in case it loses its antitrust lawsuit against the US Government.
What is the Antitrust Lawsuit?
The Department of Justice are bringing an antitrust case against Google, claiming the corporation have dominated search by making exclusive deals. If Google lose the case, it will put their deal to be the main search engine on Apple’s Safari under threat.
Google and Apple?
Google reportedly paid Apple over $20 Billion in 2023 to remain the default search engine on Safari. This gives them 70% of the search traffic they currently gain on iPhones. It is crucial for Google to be able to maintain this audience as 65% of searches are now carried out on phones compared to desktop which makes it a huge part of their market.
Google pushing Mobile App
Google want to become more self-reliant when it comes to search on phones and have been running extensive market campaigns to get users to download the Google app. Currently only 30% of users are searching through the Google app but Google is aiming for this number to be at 50% by 2030.
How it could impact SEO
In the past SEOs have typically centred their efforts based on Google’s best practices, trying to make sense of the search engine to appear higher up rankings
If Google loses its antitrust lawsuit and crucially, a large chunk of its searches, SEOs will need to start optimizing not only for Google but multiple search engines simultaneously.
Losing the antitrust lawsuit would also mean that Google must reduce the number of ads on the site, making organic searches even more important as they dominate the SERP again.
The future of Google
It may be the case that even if Google lose their relationship with Safari via their antitrust lawsuit, users flock to downloading the Google app as they don’t like the alternative search engine being provided and they are so used to Google.
One thing that is for certain is Google convincing more users to download their app will be crucial in protecting them from being reliant on Apple in the future.
