SEO in 2024: Winners, Losers, and Overall Trends

These articles were originally published on the Sistrix Blog on January 17, 2025, and February 6, 2025.

2024 was a jam-packed year that brought major developments in the SEO space, largely driven by growing competition between traditional search engines and large language models (LLMs), including emerging challengers like ChatGPT and Claude. Here’s our annual review of the winners and losers in Google search.

2024 Search Summary

In addition to the changes related to AI, such as AI Overviews and Gemini, Google also launched and implemented various new spam policies, improved its ranking systems, and greatly elevated forums and user-generated content, which caused massive volatility in the search results.

In this report, you’ll find the SISTRIX annual winners list and analysis of some of the more interesting gains throughout 2024. The winners are broken up into categories based on the type of site and/or the type of SEO approach that lead to significant year-over-year gains in visibility.

AI Overviews & Gemini: Google’s continued focus on AI & competition with Bing/OpenAI

The biggest change to SEO in 2024 was undoubtedly Google’s launch of AI Overviews, formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE) on May 14, 2024. AI Overviews was formally rolled out after being announced at Google IO, and despite a rocky start, Google continued improving and expanding its rollout throughout 2024. Toward the back half of the year, Google had expanded AIO to over 100 countries, reaching most regions across the world, except the Middle East and continental Europe.

Google also continued to innovate Gemini, with the launch of Gemini 2.0 toward the end of 2024. This multimodal AI model is designed to enhance autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Google also previewed Project Astra and Project Mariner, which assist with real-time AI assistance and web navigation.

At the end of the year, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, indicated that “the stakes are high” for 2025, and Google needs to be “relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of [AI] and solve real user problems.”

The rise of user-generated content and forums

Another big change to SEO in 2024, continuing from a trend that started in mid-2023, was the massive rise in SEO visibility among forums and user-generated content. This trend began after Google announced it would be prioritizing “Hidden Gems” in the search results. Several of the greatest visibility winners fell into this category.

Google ramped up visibility of a new SERP feature, called “What People Are Saying,” which seems to be an extension of similar features from the past, such as “Perspectives” and “Forums.” This SERP feature exhibits social media posts, forum discussions, videos, and blog content highlighting different user perspectives on a given topic. This is yet another example of how Google is showcasing more first-hand experience from user-generated content directly in the search results.

Implementation of aggressive spam policies & manual actions

One of the most significant SEO developments in 2024 was Google’s announcement, and followed implementation, of 3 new types of spam violations: Scaled Content Abuse, Site Reputation Abuse, and Expired Domain Abuse. The implementation of these spam policies followed other aggressive algorithm updates and automated measures that dramatically reduced the organic rankings and visibility of affected websites, such as the March 2024 Core Update.

Biggest Domain Winners of SEO Visibility in 2024

Listed below are the top 100 winning domains of 2024 in US search followed by sector-by-sector analysis

Biggest winners in terms of absolute visibility increases:

Biggest winners in terms of percentage visibility increases:

SISTRIX IndexWatch 2024: 100 Winning Domains (Percentage Increases)

User generated content sites & forums

Just like in 2024, one of the most salient trends among the list of winning sites is the growth of sites containing user-generated content, especially among forum websites.

SISTRIX IndexWatch 2024: User Generated Content Sites & Forums

Reddit.com was once again the biggest absolute winner of SEO visibility in 2024, increasing by 1,274 points throughout the year, making it 3rd greatest visibility holder in the United States. For reference, Reddit was the #92 biggest visibility site in the U.S. at the start of 2023. Reddit has surged in rankings and visibility for all types of keywords throughout the year, making it an unexpected SEO competitor for most types of online businesses, especially comparison and product review websites.

Another popular UGC site, HubPages, saw tremendous visibility growth toward the end of 2024, primarily driven by its Discover subdomain (discover.hubpages.com).

HubPages’ “Discover” subdomain jumped in visibility during the August 2024 Core Update, and again with the November 2024 Core Update. This subdomain contains thousands of articles submitted by guest contributors, many of which appear to leverage AI-generated content and stock photography.

The table below drills into the keywords where HubPages’ Discover subdomain gained traffic and visibility between July 2024 and December 2024:

Throughout the latter half of 2024, HubPages Discover secured top organic rankings across a wide range of topics, including pet content, music, quotes, jokes, and popular names. Interestingly, many of these articles resemble low-quality content that often causes demotion by Google’s algorithm updates targeting spammy content. This suggests Google’s algorithms may put more weight on prioritizing UGC websites like HubPages, which contain authentic human experiences and contributions, over penalizing or demoting individual articles included on those sites.

This growth appears to have been tied to a larger trend of Google increasing visibility to forum and UGC websites. All 6 websites shown below saw substantial visibility growth throughout 2024 (continued from 2023), and each site is rich with forum discussions, conversations with experts, and/or and user-submitted content.

Ecommerce domains

Many major ecommerce sites saw significant visibility gains throughout 2024.

SISTRIX IndexWatch 2024: eCommerce sites

Many of these ecommerce websites had seen visibility declines throughout mid-2022 until the end of 2023, but have steadily climbed back throughout 2024.

Carters.com, which saw substantial growth in the second half of the year, earned the #1 position for many high-volume commercial keywords, including “baby clothes,” “kids clothing store” and “childrens clothes.” Drilling down into these position changes between April and December of 2024 reveals that many of these terms saw URL changes, indicated by the red exclamation point in the URL column. This could indicate that the site underwent a platform migration or other type of website overhaul that resulted in URLs changing, which might have contributed to its substantial SEO growth throughout the year.

Programmatic SEO strategies that leverage AI:

For some of the winners, visibility growth stemmed from a “programmatic SEO” strategy, which use automation to scale pages that target many different search queries relevant to the site’s core offerings. For example, the site ck12.org, which claims to be the “world’s most powerful AI tutor,” has seen substantial visibility growth, predominantly stemming from its ‘flexbooks’ subdomain and ‘/flexi’ subfolders:

The most visible directories are shown in the image below.

These pages appear to use the site’s own AI product to provide helpful answers to common search queries, such as metric and temperature conversions:

Example of a top ranking article:

Another site using a similar approach is Quillbot.com, an AI detection and productivity tool that has seen a 490% increase in visibility throughout 2024:

Significant keyword rankings are shown below:

Quillbot’s top-ranking pages contain AI tools for translations, paraphrasing, grammar checks and more, and it appears to have dedicated pages for each of the language translations it offers:

These examples demonstrate how programmatic SEO can still be effective when the content is helpful and useful for visitors, and not implemented in a way that could risk being flagged by Google’s new “Scaled Content Abuse” spam policies.

Travel & Hotels

Various sites focused on travel guidance, hotels, and flights are among the 2024 winner list for various reasons:

Site migrations & website mergers (Virgin Airlines, Hardrock)
Absorbing top-rankings lost by travel blogs affected by Google’s algorithm updates, such as the Helpful Content Update
Improving and expanding high-quality content targeting popular search terms, such as Marriott’s /destination/ pages

IndexWatch US Winners – Travel and Hotels

Marriott.com saw a 172.3% visibility increase throughout 2024, largely stemming from its /destinations/ pages.

Hardrock saw significant organic visibility growth when it consolidated several sites and site sections onto one domain (hardrock.com).

Similarly, the Virgin Airlines website appears to have migrated its UK version into its US (.com) version, generating greater overall visibility than when the sites were operated separately.

Government Sites

Many government sites were among the 2024 winner’s list, with the greatest overall winner being cancer.gov with a 48 point increase in visibility.

IndexWatch US Winners – Government Sites

Most of cancer.gov’s growth stemmed from its dictionary section, which provides trustworthy definitions for medical and cancer-related terminology. These pages frequently rank in position 1:

As with previous years, several major social media sites also saw significant growth. While this is a yearly pattern due to the sites’ overall size growing over time, Instagram and YouTube, in particular, appeared to benefit from increased SEO visibility toward the end of 2024.

instagram.com
youtube.com
facebook.com

Twitter.com also migrated to x.com toward the end of 2024, ultimately earning back its prior visibility levels:

Recipe Sites

Several major recipe sites appeared on the winner list this year, with at least 4 sites seeing a massive increase in organic visibility in October 2024. Interestingly, this date fell outside of a confirmed Google core update:

IndexWatch US Winners – Recipe Sites

Music Sites

Another sector of domains that showed substantial growth throughout 2024 was music websites: sites containing audio players, lyrics, playlists, and information about individual artists and performers.

IndexWatch US Winners – Music Sites

The greatest winner in this category was Spotify, which greatly benefitted from the August 2024 Core Update, and saw just under 300 new visibility points throughout 2024:

Most of Spotify’s big gains came from its artist, album, and/or track pages earning top 10 positions for high-volume names of musicians or celebrities. For example, Spotify earned top 10 rankings for the below keywords, which each have monthly search volumes of 500,000 or greater:

Below is an example of how Spotify moved into position 4 for the keyword “Scarlett Johansson” by the end of 2024, after not ranking anywhere in the top 20 for that keyword earlier in the year:

Google’s behavioral data may have determined that these Spotify pages provide a top experience for searchers looking for the names of musical artists, which led to higher rankings for these keywords across the board.

Conclusion – Winners

2024 marked a transformative year in SEO, primarily driven by Google’s aggressive push into AI technology and a focus on elevating forums and user-generated content.

The launch of AI Overviews (formerly SGE) in May 2024 and subsequent release of Gemini 2.0 signaled Google’s commitment to AI integration, while Google’s organic search results simultaneously elevated the visibility of forums and user-generated content sites. This shift was most notably demonstrated by Reddit’s remarkable performance, which saw a 190.9% increase in visibility throughout 2024, making it the third most visible site in Google’s US search results by the year’s end.

The year’s visibility winners spanned diverse categories, with particularly strong performances in e-commerce, travel, and government sectors. Major ecommerce retailers like Lenovo, eBay, and Nike saw significant gains, while some travel sites benefited from strategic site migrations and content improvements. Government websites also performed well, led by Cancer.gov’s 48-point visibility increase.

Successful strategies occasionally involved programmatic SEO leveraging AI, as demonstrated by platforms like ck12.org and quillbot.com, along with successful site consolidations and migrations, and an emphasis on comprehensive, authoritative content.

Notably, several specialized sectors emerged as surprising winners throughout the year. A handful of authoritative recipe sites experienced a collective surge in October 2024, while music-related platforms, particularly Spotify, saw substantial growth following the August 2024 Core Update.

The above trends, combined with the strong performance of user-generated content platforms like Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange and GitHub, suggest a shift in Google’s ranking preferences toward sites offering authentic, user-driven experiences and specialized, authoritative content.

SEO Losers in Google US Search 2024

Between various core updates, new spam policies, manual actions, and spam updates, the visibility drops felt by many sites were staggering, particularly in the publishing industry. On the contrary, as discussed in our analysis of the biggest visibility winners in 2024, these losses were often replaced by fast-growing sites featuring user-generated content and forum discussions, such as Reddit, Quora, and Just Answer.

This article is the second of a two-part series and will focus primarily on the biggest visibility losers in 2024.

What Drove the Greatest Declines?

For sites seeing significant visibility declines on Google throughout 2024, the losses generally stemmed from a few important events and changes to search:

March Core & Spam Updates

In March of 2024, Google launched the combined March Core and Spam Updates, the longest and biggest core update in its history. With these updates, Google originally intended to remove 40% of “unhelpful” content from the search results, but Google claimed that figure was closer to 45%. Google significantly lowered the rankings of websites it deemed to be focused more on optimizing for search engines than on providing genuine value to human readers.

Alongside the core update, Google introduced 3 new spam policies in March 2024: site reputation abuse, scaled content abuse, and expired domain abuse. These policies aimed to demote the visibility of sites engaged in egregious spam behaviors that violate Google’s content guidelines. Affected site owners received manual actions from Google’s webspam team, beginning in March and continuing throughout the year.

Many of the biggest visibility losers in 2024 saw dramatic declines resulting from these joint updates, as will be demonstrated with several visibility charts throughout the article.

Reduced Visibility of Review Content, Enhanced Visibility for UGC & Forums

One major trend throughout 2024 was that many sites focused on product reviews saw visibility decline across the board. This may be due to Google increasing the visibility of real-life conversations on forum sites like Reddit and Quora replacing the top rankings previously held by product review articles. Below is an example for how the SERP changed for the keyword “best moisturizer” throughout the year – Reddit took the #1 position, and Quora moved into position 5 after not ranking in the top 10. While this change to the SERP landscape seems subtle, the impact is significant at scale across thousands of product review sites.

Biggest Search Visibility Losses of 2024

Listed below are the top 100 losing domains of 2024 in US search followed by sector-by-sector analysis.

Percentage decreases:

Absolute decreases:

Site Reputation Abuse

Google sent manual actions for Site Reputation Abuse on November 19, 2024. According to Google, “Site Reputation Abuse is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host’s already-established ranking signals.” While there is no way to confirm externally that a site received a manual action without seeing that site’s own Google Search Console account, several notable sites saw dramatic visibility declines on this date for subfolders and subdomains that fit the definition of what Google was looking to demote in search.

By looking at the greatest absolute losers in the “Movers and Shakers” report across the dates November 17 to November 24, 2024, you can see several sites impacted by these manual actions:

Overlaying the visibility of several affected sites during this window reveals several large publishers who saw significant visibility declines starting on November 19, 2024:

Drilling down into specific subfolders on Forbes.com reveals how visibility dropped to 0 across its /advisor/, /health/, and /home-improvement/ subfolders in the days after the Site Reputation Abuse manual actions were sent out by Google.

Another site on the loser list that was notorious in the SEO industry for accepting sponsored posts (a potential form of site reputation abuse) is OutlookIndia.com. While its greatest visibility decline took place in September 2023, the trend continued throughout 2024, with another major drop occurring during the March Core and Spam Updates.

Product Review Sites

Several prominent websites focused on product reviews saw substantial visibility declines throughout the year, which appear to have been exacerbated by the March 2024 Core Update. The below chart shows how Lifewire.com, Newegg.com, Goodhousekeeping.com, and Cnet.com, all of which feature product reviews across many different categories, saw visibility declines throughout 2024. This trend was exacerbated by major drops occurring during the March 2024 Core Update (letter A), which extended through the beginning of May.

Programmatic SEO & Thin Affiliate Content

“Programmatic SEO” is the technique of using a database to automate the scaling of thousands of pages that closely match users’ search queries. These pages often contain publicly available data or information, such as Census Bureau data or reviews scraped from other sites.

While this tactic can be implemented in ways that successfully drive organic traffic, it also comes with the risk of being treated as a form of “scaled content abuse.” According to Google, scaled content abuse can occur when sites “scrape feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations)… where little value is provided to users.”

Many of the biggest losers appear to fall into this category. For example, the below sites contain thousands of keyword-targeted pages containing information collected or scraped from other sites, such as population and demographic information; luxury hotel listings (with affiliate links to major OTAs), or data about public schools.

Below is an example of how these pages look in Google’s search results. While the pages each technically contain unique content, the site claims to “[analyze and update] numerous public data sets from federal and state education agencies,” as its approach to content creation. This could fit Google’s criteria for scaled content abuse, if Google’s algorithms determine this content’s primary purpose is to manipulate search rankings and not help users. Of course, this is subjective, as many users are likely to find value in the way these sites present content. However, Google is able to make its own decisions about what content it believes is written primarily for search engines and not meant for users first.

Content-Focused Publications

Many niche sites, whose primary purpose is to provide informational or comparison content related to highly searched topics, each saw dramatic percent visibility declines greater than -80%. These sites offer a steady stream of informational content on various topics, such as ‘how to’ articles or instructional guides, and often implement aggressive display advertising tactics and/or affiliate links as their primary source of monetization.

Below are several examples:

For most of these sites, the most precipitous drops took place during the March Core and Spam Updates, where Google claims to have reduced the visibility of “unhelpful” content in the search results by 45%:

Throughout 2024, Google appeared to reduce the overall visibility of niche informational sites in favor of ranking user-generated content on forums, ecommerce results, and/or product and service pages from major brand websites.

For example, the below SERP comparison shows how the site autoblog.com held the position 1 ranking at the beginning of 2024 for “best bluetooth car speakerphone,” a 750 MSV keyword. By the end of 2024, several shifts had taken place in the SERP, which were common throughout 2024:

Autoblog moved from position 1 to position 4
Amazon and Jabra (ecommerce sites) moved into the top 2 positions
CNET began ranking in the top 10
Reddit earned an extra ranking result and stronger rankings, plus a new top 10 result for Quora
YouTube improved in rankings

Ecommerce

Several large ecommerce players, such as Bestbuy.com, Walmart.com, Homedepot.com, Etsy.com, and Macys.com, saw gradual declines throughout 2024.

While the overall absolute visibility declines were significant for each of these sites throughout 2024, drilling down into individual keyword drops does not reveal any obvious patterns or examples of major ranking declines. Instead, the sites appear to have lost a few positions each for a wide variety of commercial keywords, which has a significant impact in aggregate.

In many cases, the sites appear to have lost top rankings to more niche ecommerce competitors whose brand specializes in that product. For example, BestBuy.com lost the #1 ranking for the keyword “speaker receiver” to the website Crutchfield, which, according to the brand website, is a “car and home audio/video electronics retailer.”

Travel Blogs & Online Travel Agencies

Various travel websites appeared in the list of greatest visibility losers, including big players like Hotels.com, Kayak.com, and TravelandLeisure.com:

IndexWatch Losers USA. Travel Blogs & Online Travel Agencies

Several of these sites saw similar visibility patterns, with big gains at the start of 2024, and gradual declines beginning in May. Interestingly, a few of the sites saw visibility drops followed by increases between May 6 and June 10, which could indicate that the movement was algorithmic and affected various sites within the travel category.

Looking at patterns across keyword declines, one trend is clear: these OTA sites are now competing more heavily with official airline websites, hotel websites, and Google’s own travel website, Google Travel.

For the keyword “flights to New York” in the above example, Kayak dropped from position 3 in February to position 6 in December. Google Travel earned the #3 ranking during this timeframe, after not having ranked anywhere in the top 10.

As you can see in the above chart, Google Travel (google.com/travel) has exploded in SEO visibility in the last 2 years, becoming a new competitor to many of the major OTA websites.

Conclusion – Losers

2024 marked a significant shift in Google’s search landscape, with many previously successful websites experiencing dramatic declines in visibility. The March Core and Spam Updates proved to be particularly impactful, with Google claiming to remove approximately 45% of what it deemed “unhelpful” content from search results. These changes appear to have disproportionately affected product review sites, content-focused publications, certain programmatic SEO implementations, and some travel and ecommerce platforms. The introduction of new spam policies targeting site reputation abuse, scaled content abuse, and expired domain abuse caused further declines throughout the year,

A clear trend emerged throughout the year as Google shifted away from traditional review and informational articles from publisher sites in favor of user-generated content from platforms like Reddit and Quora. Major publishers like Forbes saw significant drops in visibility across specific content categories due to both algorithmic changes and manual actions, while ecommerce giants like Best Buy and Walmart experienced gradual declines across a broad spectrum of commercial keywords. These changes reflect Google’s continued emphasis on prioritizing content that provides genuine value to users over content primarily optimized for search engines, which was consistently shared throughout Google’s communications in 2024.

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