This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

Since 2010, I’ve worked on educational websites, software, and technologies. This has included doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for content-based online businesses. By an SEO content-based online business, I mean a business that builds web content in some niche by writing and posting relevant articles, attempting to get them to rank highly with the search engines for certain keywords (which can be individual words or multi-word terms). Reference to “search engines” in this context is a euphemism. Throughout my time doing SEO, Google controlled over 90 percent of search, a market share it continues to hold to this day (actually, to be precise, by the end of 2024 Google market share finally dipped below 90 percent to 89.98 percent). An SEO business therefore needs to please Google or else it is dead in the water.

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How an online business that depends on search engines works

The business model for an SEO business looks something like the following: Such a business attempts to draw people to its webpages and websites by getting its content (mainly articles but also infographics, videos, etc.) to rank highly with the search engines, which is to say Google. Thus, when people use Google to search for keywords relevant to the business, they will naturally tend to find the business’s content because it ranks highly with Google. The business then monetizes (makes money off) the traffic from those searches once users click on links from Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and thus find their way to the business’s website.

The traffic that comes to websites through SEO is said to be “organic,” as distinguished from ad-driven traffic. For ad-driven traffic, businesses must pay a third party (usually Google, which controls an immense amount of ad space and brings in an immense amount of ad revenue). As we’ll see, Google has a perverse incentive to get SEO businesses that depend on organic search to shift to an advertising model in which Google gets paid ad revenue.

SEO businesses need to pay for SEO, but that money doesn’t go to Google. Rather, it goes to crafting content of interest to users and making sure that content gets linked to by parties interested in the content. Because Google’s PageRank algorithm is modeled on academic citation indexes, where importance of research is gauged by citations to the work (both in quantity and quality), for content to rise to the top of the Google SERPs typically requires a lot of links (as happens when content goes “viral”). SEO businesses pay to procure such links, often by having people on staff that contact other websites and try to interest them in their content and incentivize them to link to it.

How Google makes money

To see the difference between organic vs. paid traffic, simply “google” a given keyword. Suppose, for instance, that right now you tried googling “best online colleges.” The first items Google presents are sponsored, which means that they are ads. I’m seeing four such ads (two from the online schools Liberty and SNHU, and then from some websites that promise to help prospective students find the right school). You may see different sponsored items than I do (Google adapts its search results to specific user profiles, which as we’ll see is a prime temptation for it to do evil).

The sponsored items are paid for by companies as advertising revenues to Google. These can be enormously expensive. I don’t have the precise current figures for the keyword “best online colleges,” but several years back someone in the educational space told me that these ads cost around $70. So if you click on these ads, you are costing the advertisers a lot of money and you are putting a lot of money in Google’s pocket. Google makes over $200 billion a year from these ads, which is about two-thirds of Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company’s) total revenues.

The actual cost of a Google ad for a given keyword is decided through an auction where companies bid on how much they are willing to pay for an ad. To see how lucrative some of these sponsored items (ads) for particular keywords can be to Google, here is a list of some of the higher-valued keywords. I list the keyword first and then the average cost per click:

1. mesothelioma cancer lawyer …  $226.50
2. virginia mesothelioma lawyers … $224.00
3. hawaii mesothelioma lawyers … $207.90
4. mesothelioma lawyer new jersey … $178.70
5. oklahoma mesothelioma attorneys … $164.90
6. maryland mesothelioma attorneys … $163.20
7. florida mesothelioma lawyers … $162.00
8. mesothelioma lawyer massachusetts … $158.50
9. kansas mesothelioma lawyer … $155.30
10. mesothelioma lawyer west virginia … $147.80

All of these keywords combine mesothelioma (a cancer caused by asbestos) and reference to an attorney or lawyer. The intent of someone doing such a search is presumably to find a lawyer to represent a prospective client who has mesothelioma through asbestos exposure. Legal firms thus pay hefty sums for these ads to attract clients seeking damages for being negligently exposed to asbestos and coming down with mesothelioma. The damages can be quite large. Attorneys representing plaintiffs in such cases typically work on a contingency basis. The going rate is 33 to 40 percent of the settlement or award. Hence these high costs per click.

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Returning to our “best online colleges” search example, with its smaller but still sizable cost per click, we find that after the sponsored items comes still more promotional material from Google. Thus, I’m seeing (maybe it’s different for you) an AI (artificial intelligence)-generated summary of what Google is putting forward as the ten best online colleges. Sometimes Google also includes a knowledge panel that summarizes some topic or gives a biosketch of some person queried in a search.

Re-presenting as opposed to representing

Google has all this information from searching the web and re-presenting what it finds there. Just as financial institutions are not entrepreneurs and thus don’t create value but merely invest in existing value, so Google is not a content creator but merely highlights existing content. And yet, Google’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will actually visit the articles and sites where the creators originally presented the information. Accordingly, Google’s business expands at the expense of the sites whose content it re-presents.

Note that I’m using “re-present” differently from “represent.” Google re-presents, as in presents again, material that it ingests and regurgitates. This is material that, properly speaking, belongs (as intellectual property) to others but that Google helps itself to as though it were its own. This is a potential chink in its armor that could lead to significant legal exposure if the laws surrounding its exorbitant privileges as a platform were changed.

Next: A potential chink in Google’s armor: Loss of legal immunity

Here’s Part 1: The evilization of Google—and what to do about it Part 1: Understanding Google’s dominance over the internet

Featured image credit: Pawel Czerwinski – Unsplash