An Empirical Investigation On Search Engine Ad Disclosure
This highlights a potential consumer protection issue where users may unknowingly click on ads, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research about ad disclosure and user behavior.
The study investigated whether German search engine users could distinguish between ads and organic results on Google, finding that only a small percentage could reliably do so and that user knowledge of Google's business model was very limited.
This representative study of German search engine users (N=1,000) focuses on the ability of users to distinguish between organic results and advertisements on Google results pages. We combine questions about Google's business with task-based studies in which users were asked to distinguish between ads and organic results in screenshots of results pages. We find that only a small percentage of users is able to reliably distinguish between ads and organic results, and that user knowledge of Google's business model is very limited. We conclude that ads are insufficiently labelled as such, and that many users may click on ads assuming that they are selecting organic results.