Google’s Shopping service is overwhelmingly dominated by the company’s own ads despite changes last year that were supposed to give rivals a level playing field.
In Britain, Google ads account for more than 99 per cent of ads in the “Shopping” carousels that appear at alongside search results, according to a new anaysis five months after the company was forced by a European ruling to open the field to competitors.
The Silicon Valley giant only agreed to allow rivals, including comparison websites, to list their products after the European Commission found that Google had abused its market dominance by excluding them.
The company was fined a record €2.42 billion in June and given 90 days to get in line with the law.
“Google’s practices have deprived millions of European consumers of the full benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation,” Margrethe Vestager, the competition commissioner, said at the time.
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Google says that rival companies can now bid against it on equal terms for slots at the top of search results, but competitors said last September that they doubted they would be able to outbid the giant. Analysis by the software company Searchmetrics appears to bear that out, indicating that only 0.4 per cent of Shopping ads on desktop searches in the UK are from Google’s competitors. In Germany, the figure is 2 per cent.
The data indicates that in Britain, 6.1 per cent of carousels include at least one ad from a competitor. However, Searchmetrics said many ad carousels included up to 29 ads, so their visibility was “very limited”.
Cosmetics and electronics are the two sectors with the highest competitor presence. Of the rival companies now appearing, Kelkoo.co.uk was most visible in this country.
A separate analysis within the study indicates that the visibility of rival shopping comparison services such as Kelkoo in Google desktop search results dropped by 12 per cent between June and December 2017 – with the decline continuing after the September revamp of Google Shopping.
Daniel Furch from Searchmetrics said: “It is early days in this new era of Google Shopping, but our initial analysis suggests the service’s competitors as yet have no meaningful presence, at the same time as their search visibility has continued to decline.”
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Google could face further fines if the European Commission deems that it is failing to comply with the ruling. A spokesman for the commission said: “The clear principle set out in the Commission’s decision is that Google has to give equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service — not more, not less. It is up to Google to achieve and implement that equal treatment.”