Was it shorthand, or a Freudian slip?
Last Friday, Google filed court documents as it battles a breakup of its advertising technology business. In the filing, Google said the open web “is already in rapid decline.”
It seemed like a startling admission for a company that has been arguing that the web is healthier than ever.
But when Business Insider contacted Google for comment Monday, a spokesperson said the filing was referring to “open-web display advertising” market — the ads that appear on websites and the adtech infrastructure that facilitates them — rather than the open web itself, meaning websites that are accessible without a login.
On Tuesday, Google filed a memorandum to correct the record.
“In its Memorandum, Google, in a handful of instances, used the shorthand phrase ‘open web’ when referring to ‘open-web display advertising,'” the company wrote in a notice to the court. An updated version of the memorandum reflected the clarification.
But by then, a deluge of stories had been published about Google’s perceived hypocrisy. Google execs had previously sought to reassure doubters that the open web remains in good health. “From our point of view, the web is thriving,” Google’s head of Search and ads SVP Nick Fox told the AI Inside podcast in May.
It’s easy to see why it struck a nerve. Publishers have reported traffic declines and programmatic ad revenue drops that suggest the web is, in fact, not thriving at all. Similarweb found that the median zero-click rate — the number of users who didn’t click from Google’s results to a website — rose from 60% to 80% when they were met with Google’s AI Overviews.
Google has insisted that traffic from its search engine remains “relatively stable” and that AI overviews drive “higher quality clicks.” However, it has not provided data to show this, and it has also said that with AI, “trends are shifting traffic to different sites,” leading to fewer clicks on some sites and more on others.
All of this is important to Google’s defense in an antitrust suit filed by the Department of Justice in 2023.
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Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in certain online adtech markets. The DOJ wants Google to divest its AdX ad exchange and DfP ad server, which help it facilitate online ad auctions, and other behavioral remedies that would prohibit it from favoring its own ad tools. The remedies portion of the trial heads to court later this month.
In its Friday filing, Google argued that investments in non-open web display advertising, such as connected TV, are growing at the expense of those in open web display advertising.
“The world has moved significantly away from open-web display,” Google said in the filing.
But to some, the distinction between open web and open-web display advertising is blurred, as many websites that don’t require logins lean on advertising to fund themselves.
The open web is generally defined as the ecosystem of ad-supported websites — like news sites and blogs — that rely on a complex array of interoperable adtech and sit outside so-called “walled garden” tech platforms like Facebook or YouTube.
Google’s position boils down to this: Websites, typically supported by ads, are thriving, but the ad ecosystem supporting those sites is in “rapid decline.”
Jason Kint, CEO of the publisher trade association Digital Content Next — and frequent Google critic — told Business Insider that it would be “valid” to say Google’s correction to the wording was a “distinction without a difference.”
“It begs the question why it’s so sensitive for them, too,” he said.
Kint added that it could be that the “open web is declining for everyone but Google,” because its owned and operated platforms, including search, are “doing quite well.”
