In July 2023, Google said it would no longer restrict advertisers from using trademarks belonging to other organizations.
That change quickly became a problem for nonprofits that buy Google search ads to find donors. Other outfits, they discovered, were using their trademarks to attract Internet traffic.
Samaritan's Purse, a nonprofit that helps victims of natural disasters, faced new competition in the split-second auctions that determine which ads appear at the top of Google search results. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital competed with obscure search engines eager to bring more users to their sites. And misleading ads about UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, proliferated in Google search results, according to data from SpyFu and Semrush, two sites that track digital ads.
The pattern illustrated the unintended effects of Google's policy changes and how obscure changes to its advertising rules can have outsized consequences for groups that rely on the world's largest search engine. In this case, nonprofits were forced to compete with companies that could better afford Google's advertising rates.
The conflict also goes to the heart of concerns among regulators around the world that Google has simply become too powerful. Last year, the company was declared an illegal search monopoly. In August, a federal judge will decide what changes to make to promote a more competitive search market. In a separate case, a federal judge is expected to rule soon on whether Google violated antitrust law with a monopoly on ad technology, the kind of tools that serve ads on the Internet.
Google said it made the policy change regarding trademarks as part of its efforts to comply with Europe's Digital Services Act, a multi-pronged law that requires tech companies to more aggressively monitor their platforms and stop ads that target users based on their identity.
A Google spokesperson said competing search engines may serve ads that direct users to their sites, but the ads must not be misleading or deceptive.
“To ensure everything is clear to users, all ads on search results are prominently labeled, display the advertiser's website and must indicate whether they lead to another search engine,” the spokesperson said.
When someone searches for something on Google, Google runs an automated ad auction. Advertisers create ads in advance and provide Google with parameters for their bid and budget sizes, as well as the types of searches they want to appear in.
Google's systems look for relevant advertisements and decide whether to place them in the search results. The algorithms choose winning ads and determine how they are ranked based on factors such as bid price, competition from other advertisers, and the quality and relevance of the ads.
Before Google's policy change, only product resellers and information pages (such as product review sites) could use third-party brand names to promote themselves, provided they provided the services they claimed and were transparent.
The update could allow Google's search competitors to do the same. Google's change to its trademark advertising rules led to an influx of ads from smaller search engines, including Ask.com and Info.com, data from SpyFu and Semrush show. Increased competition and successful bidding led to higher advertising prices, which was a particular problem for nonprofits. (Ad costs can also fluctuate depending on the quality of the ads.)
Dozens of domains, including Info.com and sites from Ask called Find Results Now and Quickly Seek, have placed bids against nonprofits to appear on Google's search results pages. The headlines of the ads may have misled users into thinking they were clicking on a nonprofit's official website, although the smaller type below often said users could search for the charity on their site. (Google stipulated that their ads “must be clear whether the advertiser is a reseller or an informational site.”)
“Samaritan's Purse Giving – Visit our website,” read an ad from Discover Results Fast, a niche search site owned by Ask. When users clicked on the link, they were taken to search results from the Ask Media Group domain instead of the charity's website.
When Samaritan's Purse realized other sites were competing with its ads on Google, it said it tried contacting some of them to resolve the issue. But the nonprofit said it had not contacted Ask or Info.com and declined further comment.
“We are aware that other organizations are bidding against us for Google ads,” a spokeswoman for Samaritan's Purse said in a statement. “Our team that manages Google ads has already been in contact with these organizations.”
In July 2023, Search Results Delivery, an Ask domain, said “Amnesty International website – here.” The nonprofit's website wasn't actually there. Below the link was an offer to “Search Here Now!” according to the text of the ad, which was archived by Semrush.
In December 2023, an Ask landing page called Look Up Smart used a common misspelling of St. Jude, the famous children's hospital, in its advertisement. “Donate to Saint Judas | Visit our website,” the site said in the Google ad saved by Semrush, without any fine print indicating users were being taken to a search page.
Through 2024, Ask domains and other sites continued to serve Google ads related to Samaritan Purse.
Ask Media Group and System1, Info.com's parent company, both said they relied on automated tools to create ads, select bids and decide which types of searches they appear on. Ask said it used Google's tools for these features, while System1 said it used both internal and Google technologies.
A spokesperson for Ask Media Group said there was never a strategy “to make profits at the expense of charities.” Nonprofits represent less than 0.001 percent of ads on Google, the spokesperson said, and the ad price data does not indicate that the “very limited advertising in these areas had any systemic negative impact” on nonprofits' advertising costs. Charities can ask the company to stop using their names in ads, the Ask Media representative added.
Much of the time, the nonprofits retained the first ad space at the top of search results when users Googled their names, but they had to pay Google more money for the privilege, said five people who work with leading U.S. and international nonprofits, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from Google.
A Google spokesperson said the company has given more than $17 billion in free advertising to charities since 2003. Amnesty International, St. Jude and more than a dozen other major nonprofits declined to comment for this story.
Last fall, as the remnants of a hurricane devastated part of North Carolina, nonprofits such as Samaritan's Purse, Americares and Convoy of Hope all advertised on Google Search, in an effort to collect donations to help those affected by the storms. affected. Info.com placed competing ads, as did Ask Media Group under domains such as Search Online Info and Info to Discover.
System1 said its subsidiary Info.com had no intention of advertising against Samaritan's Purse and would stop any advertising that might have inadvertently increased the group's costs. The company added that it follows Google's trademark rules and policies, and that the incident did not represent broader business practices.
These types of ads continued through December. On December 30, Discover Results Fast was the third sponsored link when users Googled Samaritan's Purse.
Nonprofits focused on hurricane relief, conservation, medical research and healthcare advertising said they have had to pay Google more for ads since Google made its trademark changes.
In the last two days of 2023, a major charity, which asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, paid Google $200,000 to advertise, double what it paid on the same days in 2022 before the change took effect. said two people familiar with the commercial. The group had exhausted its marketing budget and had to stop advertising on its biggest fundraising day of the year, December 31. As a result, the people said, the group lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.
Other nonprofits are likely to lose revenue from donors who never reach their websites after being redirected to Ask's sites, said Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at Check My Ads, an online advertising watchdog.
Google's policy change “was another one of those sneaky little ways they could leverage the revenue from their products,” Ms. Garcia said.
