The big publishers are always first in row. The circle of Google is simple. Spend a lot of ad money and you will be ranked high. Even the shitietst sites and apps from publishers like UEFA, Redbull etc are listed as top apps/sites. Their reviews are often super bad. Yet they are ranked high. Its because they spend money on Google ads.
This is because Google is double dealing, they are selling both side of the transaction, on the search side they have side bar ads and in search result ads, but on the destination, they also sell the ad impressions.
So they are using their monopoly power to make money on both search and the display on the destination. So they have a huge incentive to push sites with lots of pages, more opps to get ad clicks on those big site than the small ones.
I'd guess it's more because Google's search is heavily pressured by the AI-generated sites, and Google is trying to depress anything which might be described as "a small superset of the AI-generated sites".
The extreme favoring of large and commercial sites isn't a new thing. It's one of the reasons why Google search results became so unhelpful to me years ago.
Reddit, LinkedIn, and Quora have seen a roughly 2,000% combined visibility increase in Google Search in the last 12 months. All three sites amount to around ~3 billion search traffic as estimated by tools like Semrush and Ahrefs (the total combined traffic is more in the ~5-7 billion range by my estimates). All three sites get manipulated with AI - Reddit for product reviews, and LinkedIn and Quora do it by pre-generating millions of topics (they disclose it is done with AI) and then inviting users to "contribute".
Forbes recently started blocking sections of their sites[0] because in the next few days Google will release an update[1] that is intended to address the authority abuse talked about in the HouseFresh article.
But I don't get the first part, the blatant AI spam and search result manipulation that is hurting the average blogger who can get thrown out entirely because an algorithm deemed it so. But that same algorithm rewards the bullshit I mention above.
