As a global leader in SEO and data analytics, Anastasia Braitsik has a unique vantage point on the high-stakes legal battle that could reshape the future of search. With proposals on the table that would compel Google to share its most sensitive assets, we sat down with her to understand the profound implications. Our conversation explores the potential fallout of sharing Google’s core web index, the delicate balance of spam-fighting secrecy, the immense value and privacy risks tied to user search data, and the cascading dangers of syndicating live search results.
A proposal suggests forcing Google to share its full web index, including URLs and crawl timing data. How could competitors leverage this to bypass foundational development work, and what specific proprietary insights, such as freshness signals or index tiering, would be most at risk of reverse engineering?
It would be a cataclysmic shortcut for any competitor. You have to understand, Google’s index isn’t just a list; it’s the refined product of over 25 years of sustained, exhaustive engineering. They’ve crawled trillions of pages to distill it down to the roughly 400 billion documents they deemed worthy. Handing that over means a rival could completely bypass the monumental task of crawling the vast, messy web and instead focus their resources only on the pages Google has already vetted. The real gold, however, is in the metadata. Crawl timing data is a direct window into Google’s proprietary freshness signals and index tiering structure, revealing how they prioritize new content versus evergreen information. It’s like being given not just the answers to a test, but also the teacher’s guide on how the questions were graded.
Effective spam fighting often relies on the secrecy of its methods. If spam scores were exposed to competitors, what tactics could bad actors use to exploit this information, and how might that concretely affect search result quality and undermine a search engine’s reputation with users?
The fight against webspam is an ongoing war where obscurity is your best shield. Exposing spam scores is the equivalent of handing the enemy your entire defensive playbook. Bad actors and spammers would have a field day. They could systematically test their low-quality pages against the scores, reverse-engineering the very mechanisms designed to keep them out. This would allow them to fine-tune their spam to slip past the defenses, effectively hamstringing Google’s ability to combat them. The result for users would be a tangible degradation of search quality. Imagine more misleading, low-value, or even dangerous content surfacing for your queries. This erodes the very foundation of trust, and a search engine without user trust has nothing.
Imagine a scenario where 13 months of U.S. user search data—including queries, clicks, and the exact results shown—must be shared. How does this disclose core intellectual property, and what are the primary user privacy risks when the original company doesn’t control the final data anonymization?
That data is an absolute treasure trove of intellectual property. It’s not just a log of searches; it’s a complete, living record of Google’s ranking output in response to every query from every U.S. user for over a year. It reveals precisely how their systems behave in the wild. A competitor wouldn’t just study it; they could directly use this data to train their own large language models, effectively piggybacking on billions of dollars of R&D. The privacy implications are chilling. Google invests enormous resources into anonymization, but if they lose final decision-making authority over how that data is treated before being shared, the risk of re-identification becomes very real. Users trust Google with their data, and if a breach occurs from data shared under compulsion, users will still blame Google, creating a devastating loss of faith.
If a search engine had to syndicate its live, organic results to competitors for several years, what are the cascading risks? Could you walk through how third parties might scrape this syndicated data and what it would mean for the company to lose control over its core product?
The cascading risks are enormous because you’re essentially giving away the final product—the “ten blue links” and all the associated features like Maps and Knowledge Panels—in real-time. This is the culmination of decades of innovation. Once that live feed is syndicated to a competitor, you lose all control over it. Even with contractual limits, that competitor’s site now becomes a new endpoint. Any third party could then easily “scrape” those syndicated results from the competitor’s site, meaning Google’s core product is now being freely consumed by entities it has no relationship with. It fundamentally breaks the business model and devalues the core asset that has been built with billions of dollars of investment. You’re no longer licensing a product; you’re just broadcasting it for others to capture and repurpose as they see fit.
What is your forecast for how regulators will balance fostering search competition with protecting the proprietary systems and user data that power modern search engines?
My forecast is that we are heading into a period of very difficult and delicate negotiation, likely defined by incremental, highly-scrutinized actions rather than broad, sweeping mandates. Regulators are genuinely trying to foster a more competitive landscape, but they are also increasingly aware of the “Pandora’s Box” scenario. Exposing core algorithms, spam-fighting techniques, or raw user data carries immense, irreversible risks to both the user experience and privacy. I believe we will see a move toward more targeted remedies—perhaps focused on interoperability or data portability in non-core areas—rather than forcing the disclosure of the “crown jewels.” The ultimate balance will likely be found in creating competitive access points without dismantling the complex, proprietary systems that make modern search functional and safe for users. It will be a tightrope walk for years to come.
