Is Google getting worse? A year of product review search results

The short version: In product reviews, a thin affiliate page is competing with many like it. Original testing, photos and clear methods are the way out of that crowd.

What they studied

The researchers tracked product review results for a year, from October 2022 to September 2023, measuring affiliate links, spam and signs of heavy SEO.

Key findings

• Affiliate pages are rare on the web overall (about 2.35%) but common in review results: 29% on Google (via Startpage), 42% on Bing, 41% on DuckDuckGo.
• Bing and DuckDuckGo returned two to five times as much spam as Google.
• Higher-ranked pages tended to have more affiliate links and more repetitive, simpler text.
• Google updates removed many spam sites, but the effect was often temporary as sites came back.

Key learnings

• In product reviews, a thin affiliate page is competing with many like it. Original testing, photos and clear methods are the way out of that crowd.
• Do not build on tactics that an update can switch off. Gains from them were short-lived in this study.

Things to keep in mind

• Product review queries only, and English results only.
• Google results came through the Startpage proxy.
• Correlations at the level of all results; features did not predict individual rankings.

Read it alongside

• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (Google's guidance) (Google Search Central, 2026)
• 10 SEO A/B tests that moved organic traffic by 10% or more (SearchPilot, 2024)

Source

Academic paper by Janek Bevendorff, Matti Wiegmann, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein, published by ECIR 2024 (Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), 2024.

• https://gwern.net/doc/technology/google/2024-bevendorff.pdf

We read the source and checked every figure on this page against it on October 13, 2026. Summaries and learnings are ours. Spotted an error? Tell us.

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