What happens after Google Zero and the death of cookies?

For anyone who connects with customers through content marketing and online ads, the rules of the game are about to massively shift as some of the biggest changes the SEO and ad-tech industry have seen in decades come into effect. 

Last month, in the race to compete in the frenetic AI race, Google released a new feature in the US which saw AI-powered summaries prominently placed at the top of search results above traditional links. This could significantly reduce the effectiveness of traditional content marketing and SEO. 

Zero Hour: Google’s AI tricks reducing clicks

Since Google became the dominant search engine, it has relied on an implicit and mutually beneficial exchange of value with content creators and publishers. Google crawls and indexes sites to improve the utility and breadth of its search engine, while sites gain additional traffic, which can be potentially monetized in various ways such as through advertising, affiliate links, or directly selling products and services. Now, users may be able to get all the information they need without ever clicking on a link. Indeed, when the feature was announced at Google’s annual developer conference, Google IO, the slogan was “let Google do the googling for you”. Ask it when the best time is to plant daffodils, for example, and the AI overview will tell you autumn, ideally from September to late November.

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Unsurprisingly, publishers of news, content and blogs largely reacted with dismay, with News/Media Alliance chief executive Danielle Coffey predicting that it would be “catastrophic” to search traffic. For its part, Google claims that those sites lucky enough to be included in AI overviews will “get more clicks”. The obvious follow up question is what about everyone else? Unfortunately, the prognosis is less positive. Early testing of a beta version of AI Overviews by media and advertising company Raptive indicates that the de-emphasis of website links will reduce traffic, while Gartner predicts that traffic will drop by 25% by 2026 as a result of AI chatbots and other virtual agents. 

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This has caused some tech industry analysts like Nilay Patel of the Verge to predict that Google Zero is coming, a time when the share of website referrals from Google will become negligible. That eventuality might seem overly pessimistic. Many commentators have pointed out that it is in Google's long-term business interests to incentivize the creation of quality content. After all, the appeal of search is directly linked to the strength and diversity of the open web. If Google puts a lot of websites out of business, the thinking goes, it will have fewer sources to draw on to answer user queries. 

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But is Google really in a position to be able to play the long game here? Is it not more likely that AI Overviews is a response to shareholders and other market actors who want to see signs that Google is not “falling behind” OpenAI and Microsoft in the AI race? Whatever the rationale, it is clear that the convergence of AI and search will have major implications for publishers and brands. While “zero” may be an overstatement, there is a broad expectation across the industry that organic search traffic is going to drop.

How to reach customers when the cookies crumble?

Search may be facing an uncertain future, but there’s always paid advertising, right? Actually, that’s about to change too when Google deprecates third-party cookies from Chrome next year. Users have been understandably concerned about their privacy and brands like Apple have cleverly appealed to this demographic by building a business model that is based on the sale of hardware and services rather than user data. In truth, Google is quite late to the party here. Starting back in 2017, Apple and Mozilla both announced separate plans to remove third-party cookies from Safari and Firefox respectively. As Chrome enjoys around 65% market share in the browser market, Google’s decision essentially marks the final nail in the coffin. 

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Third-party cookies are the little packets of data that live inside your browser which enable ad tech companies to build up a profile of your preferences, track your activity and purchases around the web, and serve you with ads relevant to your interests. They act as one of the technical building blocks of programmatic advertising, which has been the bedrock of e-commerce for over a decade. 

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Many people are celebrating the demise of third-party cookies, and I totally understand why. They got a bad reputation for some good reasons: Users are tired of having their activity surveilled and their privacy compromised. 

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But here’s the flip side of the coin. Like them or loathe them, third-party cookies have been good for competition in the ad market. Without them, it will be far more difficult for small businesses and new brands to reach relevant customers and optimise their advertising budgets. If you are doing programmatic advertising, the main alternative to third-party cookies is to rely on first-party and server-side data. But the incumbents with large user bases have a massive advantage in this arena. Most web shops couldn’t dream of competing with the first-party data of a firm like Amazon, for example. 

Google Topics API: Better for privacy, but a blunt instrument for advertisers

Google has done some work to try to address these concerns. In preparation for the cookieless future, it has developed an open-source technology stack called Privacy Sandbox, which is a collection of APIs that are intended to enable interest-based advertising to continue, while affording greater privacy to users. A central element of the proposals is the Topics API, which aims to move ad targeting away from long-term fingerprinting of individual users across sites towards a more short-term snapshot of recent user interests.

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For Topics to work, every top-level domain on the web will be categorised into a taxonomy of categories (e.g. sport) and subcategories (e.g. football), which is curated by humans and currently includes 469 different topics. To avoid website owners gaming the system, the classification is done by a machine-learning algorithm. If you opt in to interest-based advertising, each week, Chrome looks at your browser history and calculates your top five topics and stores them locally. When an ad-tech platform wants to serve you ads, it calls the Topics API, which will send back a maximum of three randomly selected topics from your top five, for each of the last 3 weeks. This enables the ad-tech platform to serve you an ad that is linked to an interest you have, without building an individual fingerprint of your personal browsing activity over time across multiple sites. 

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Some observers like Bosko Milekic of AdExchanger have praised Google for putting resources behind developing Privacy Sandbox despite not really needing to. After all, it has one of the most extensive troves of first-party data in tech and would arguably be in an even stronger competitive position in a post-cookie age. But Sandbox has also faced criticism on numerous fronts. For privacy campaigners like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it doesn’t go nearly far enough to respect the privacy of users. Meanwhile, regulators like the UK Competition and Markets authority fear that it could be used to reinforce and cement Google’s position at the centre of the online advertising industry. These criticisms highlight that in the current market, user privacy and market competition are often in tension: If new firms know nothing about consumers and cannot efficiently advertise online, that will favour the incumbents who have already built up first-party data when regulations were more lax, but the more data that is widely available, the worse it is for user privacy.

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For most advertisers, one of the biggest concerns about the Topics API is practical: it will be a blunt instrument for targeted advertising because topics are linked to the top-level domain. In the age of large platforms like Amazon, Facebook and YouTube, this will often fail to provide the degree of granularity needed for an efficient ad spend. Consider a user who has spent the past three weeks going on a deep dive into YouTube videos about fly fishing. He/she would seem like a perfect candidate for an advertiser who sells fishing rods and equipment. If the advertiser calls the Topics API, however, the three possible topics they will receive for this user’s interests will be “Online Communities”, “TV & Video”, and “Arts and Entertainment”. 

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A people-first approach to branding

So how can businesses and brands reach consumers in an age when both organic search traffic and paid advertising becomes less efficient? Perhaps we should view this as an opportunity to reassess what advertising and branding are. To some extent, the age of programmatic advertising has led us to lose sight of some basics. Rather than viewing our consumers as living, breathing human beings with rational and emotional wants and desires, we have come to regard them entirely through the prism of metrics to be optimised. In some cases, this prioritises short term impressions, click-through and conversion over long-term relationships and brand resonance.

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To turn the tide, CMOs and other leaders should adopt a people-first approach to branding. The businesses that can develop a direct relationship with their customers will be far more resilient to the changes to come. That could mean developing a truly insightful newsletter or podcast that drops directly into people’s inboxes without needing to rely on search traffic, or developing focussed online communities where people keep coming back without searching. 

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But more than anything, the new environment will require a greater focus on the people behind the products. Research already indicates that in many instances posts shared by individuals garner more engagement and sharing than posts by corporate brands. This is an opportunity for purpose-driven businesses to get their message out through their leaders and wider team and circumvent the search and advertising hierarchy. But people-first branding involves a delicate balance between ensuring that each post feels authentic and true to the individual, while not contradicting the core values of the business. 

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This challenge has two implications. On the one hand, the entire team needs to be truly on board with the purpose of the firm and this should be strongly weighted when making new hires. In addition, individuals need to be equipped with the skills and social media literacy necessary to express themselves effectively.

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There will always be nerds and number crunchers involved in advertising, and they will continue to provide valuable insights. But the seismic shifts in the industry present the opportunity to bring more direct interaction and humanity back into branding. As a result, personal branding will move from playing a supportive role to becoming the key driver of traffic, leads and sales.

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To view details about my keynote speeches and coaching courses on topics like personal branding, LinkedIn for sales, and authentic leadership, click here. 

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Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash