In the short-term, SEO professionals shouldn’t stress about the Google antitrust results. This outcome is a big deal for Google but won’t change marketers’ day-to-day workflows. “No court can magically shift a market where Google controls 95% of search,” said Dr. Pete Meyers, principal innovation architect at Moz.

Even if this outcome causes a loss in Google’s organic market share and boosts other search engines like Bing, SEO fundamentals would remain the same on those search engines, said Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at Amsive.

Still, these search engines are not identical, and optimizing for more will complicate things for SEO professionals. “If the antitrust trial against Google leads to a more competitive search market, you might need to optimize for multiple search engines, not just Google,” Neil Patel, cofounder of NP digital, wrote a blog post.

Despite limited changes for SEOs, this ruling will harbor uncertainty in the SEO world, said Meyers. It comes during a period of change for Google, due to generative AI competition and shifting search behaviors, which could result in major impacts on paid search.

The ruling could make Google more cautious, allowing room for traditional competitors like Microsoft, new competitors like OpenAI’s SearchGPT, product search like Amazon, and social search like TikTok, according to Meyers.

“We are already seeing major threats to Google outside of the monopoly ruling. From ChatGPT to Perplexity to TikTok, users are searching in new and different ways,” said Ray, who sees large language models (LLMs) as a greater risk to Google in the short term than the monopoly ruling.

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