There is some speculation within the SEO and search community that Google’s search results have recently become more personalized and tailored. This is based on people comparing the search results to being logged into Google and signed out of Google.
To be clear, there has not been a study done on these theories yet but there is new buzz around this happening. I always thought there are differences between the search results I see at my desk, versus what you see at your desk, for the same query. But some are saying it has been amped up in a big way.
A post by Olaf Kopp asked on LinkedIn, “November Core Update = Personalization Update?” I doubt the Google November 2024 core update was about personalization but maybe something else rolled out around then, related to personalization. Olaf added, “In the last few days I have seen a lot of examples where the search results when logged in differ significantly from those when logged out. This would also explain why the tools don’t see any big effects with the update. Anyone else?”
Others chimed in agreeing:
Marie Haynes replied, “Interesting. I am seeing a number of cases where GSC shows significant change and the tools do not. Perhaps this is why.”
Matthias Thier replied, “Yes, it could really be stronger. I see different orders of ranking pages (ok, that’s not new, but they seem stronger to me). Sometimes domains are completely missing in a variant. Sometimes there are Twitter boxes, in other cases there are not. Sometimes there are video boxes that do not appear in the other state.”
Dan Hinckley replied, “Personalization is way up in my observations. Domains I have visited for top of funnel pages getting personalized reason for inclusion at bottom of funnel queries.
Christian Kunz replied, “I can confirm that the ranking differences between logged in and anonymous access I have been able to witness have widened.”
Again, I randomly just looked at a dozen or so search results signed in and out and they did not match. But I do not know if they are more or less personalized than they were a few weeks ago compared to today.
In 2023, Google began personalizing a bit more based on previous query. And in 2021, Google said personalization in search is rare and light, only really done for immediate previous query and location / region reasons. Google said this also in 2018.
Are any of you noticing this?
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
Update: Daniel James Stoker posted an estimation of how much personalization increased in Google Search after seeing this story. He wrote:
During comparison periods not associated with a Google algorithm update, there was an average absolute position change variance of 1.08 between our internal QPAPs and Ahrefs query-page rank tracker across more than a thousand unique query-page combinations. In contrast, when comparing the same set of query-page combinations for the pre- and post-periods of the Google November 2024 core update, the average absolute position change variance increased to 2.82.
Thanks to Jason Kilgore for notifying me of this.
He also posted this visualization of the data:
