The fall of Google search - Why Google is so poor in 2025

Google search has evidently become worse. Why is that?

By Markus Backman

February 4th, 2025

You’re not imagining it. Despite Google’s promises with the Helpful Content Update in 2022 to turn the search engine “people-first”, it seems that the opposite has happened. Why have Google become so poor in quality and what happened?

• In this post:

This is what happened to Google

Once upon a time, the exchange was simple: content creators provided helpful, high-quality content “by people, to people,” and Google rewarded them with visibility and traffic. Now, that formula feels unreliable.

Perform a search today, and you’re more likely than ever to encounter:

• Irrelevant or low-quality results that won't serve the user

• Less quality content, setting useful content aside

• An overwhelming number of intrusive advertisements and sponsored content that dominate the page.

Is Google a victim of "Enshittification"?

There's an interesting theory by Cory Doctorow, explaining how once prominent technology platforms that served their users fall into monetary profits, killing them eventually. Is this what is happening to Google?

Enshittification was first used by Cory Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post that was republished three months later in Locus. He expanded on the concept in another blog post that was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

Is Google now in this phase? With the rise of AI-powered tools like Chat-GPT and growing user dissatisfaction, it’s a question worth asking.

This is what Google has come to in 2025

We know that Google have become worse, and there are several factors leading to this. Here's the reasons we think makes Google lose its course.

Worse search results: Google Search are evidently filled with low-quality content, AI-generated junk, and ads that take up valuable space. Finding what you are looking for have become much harder with irrelevant results appearing in the search results.

A declining user experience: Google Search is not as simple as it used to be. More distractions, forced features, and unnecessary UI changes make it less user-friendly.

More ads, less content: You are not imagining it. Excessive and intrusive ads and sponsored content are everywhere. This have made it more difficult for find real, organic content. Even when the search intent is clear, Google has proven that ads take priority.

What makes this change?

What we need to understand is that there are many factors contributing to Googles decline. We'll look at them here below.

A change in search behavior

The way people search has changed from rigid keywords to using natural language. Users now expect a more dynamic and conversational search experience, where they are proactively guided to their search goal. Chatbots and AI technology has without a doubt formed this trend. Users crave more instant answers without wasting time on what's unnecessary. Can Google correspond to this?

Then there's social platforms such as Reddit that revolves around user-generated content. It's another spectrum we've seen people favoring and becoming a part of their search pattern: Users look for confirmation through these posts that are contributed by other people.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

Google is not a charity organization, and never was. However, content creators, web developers, and marketers had a good agreement with Google: Provide useful, high-quality content for users to engage with and get rewarded with visibility. Now, it seems rather than empowering users to engage deeply with content, Google seems to have doubled down on monetization strategies by prioritizing ads and retaining users within its ecosystem at the expense of quality.

It is understandable that Google needs to make money somehow, but the way things are now with excessive advertisement and pushing junk content to the top of search results, Google really puts every effort for businesses to pay for Google's advertising.

Competition from other platforms

As mentioned before, other platforms such as Chat-GPT, Quora and Reddit etc. are becoming more popular as they've proved they can be utilized as excellent search tools. It could be that Google feel threatened by users substituting Google with other platforms and are therefore making changes to their service.

We need to remember that Google is still a tech behemoth, expanding to so many areas with their ecosystem and products. A small decline of users won't hurt Google, and only if enough people resort to other alternatives Google would be forced to make changes.

Corporate prioritization

It could simply be that Google is no longer focused on delivering the best search experience as they may prioritize profits over usability. The search engine is designed to keep users within Google’s ecosystem, whether through featured snippets, AI-generated answers, or direct integrations with its services. It could be that stepping up in the monetization is simply more rewarding right now instead of prioritizing the users. That's enshittification for you!

Privacy and data collection

It's no surprise that Google tracks everything from search history, browsing habits, and user interactions. Using Google come at the cost of user privacy, really. Although a small trend so far, many are gradually abandoning Google products for others like DuckDuckGo or Brave. Google’s increasing reliance on data-driven monetization is making people more cautious about using its services for sure. We'll see how this develop in the future.

Bottomline - What happens next?

So, where does that leave us? Is Google a victim of "Enshittification" as demonstrated in the beginning? I would say that there are clear signs it's the beginning of that.

For now, it could be that Google is testing their limits. How far can they go with the monetization without users abandoning them? It might be a test, we don't really know.

Another thing could be that with the rise of generative-AI and competition from other platforms, Google is hastily trying out new approaches to their search engine to adapt, and this could stir up Google search.