Excerpts from: Google Continues Election Interference: Still Buries Trump, Other Biden Opponents

Republicans are about to have their third presidential primary debate, but Google continues to bury their campaign websites in search results.  

Google's search engine once again favored Biden in searches conducted by MRC Free Speech America one week prior to the third Republican presidential primary debate. MRC researchers broadly searched for “presidential campaign websites” as well as four additional searches specifying the party affiliation of even the third-party candidates. Google continued to bury Republican candidates’ websites if their websites showed up on the first page of results at all. Meanwhile, Google’s AI chatbot previously — and with clear bias — ranked the presidential candidates when asked, but following the release of an MRC study on Bard, it is now staying mum.

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In another query, MRC researchers searched Google without specifying party affiliation. Replicating the first MRC pre-debate Google search study, MRC researchers searched the innocuous terms “presidential campaign websites.” Google’s search engine produced Biden’s campaign website as the third search result along with Williamson’s campaign website, which came up as the fourth result. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) 2020 presidential campaign website came up as the eleventh result. 

After twice hiding Kennedy’s campaign website, Google’s search engine finally let it through to the first page of results but only as the twenty-fourth result. DeSantis’s website similarly appeared in the search for “presidential campaign websites” for the first time since MRC began analyzing Google’s search. However, his website was buried as the tenth result. [None of the other candidates were found in the search results.]

The importance of where a search result appears on the first page of a Google search cannot be overstated. Not only is Google the go-to search engine for most people, holding a market share of nearly 92 percent worldwide, the first result is the most likely link to be clicked on, according to Brian Dean, a search engine optimization expert. In fact, less than one percent of users click on links that don’t appear on the first page of search results. Dean conducted a study analyzing how often users click on various rankings of Google search results. His blog, Backlinko, reported that “the #1 result in Google has a 10x higher [Click Through Rate] compared to the #10 result.” Astoundingly, less than one percent (.63%) of users click through to the second page of search results, underscoring the importance of positioning on the first page of search results. Other studies, like one conducted in 2020 by Sistrix, show similar results.