FTC: Search Engines Aren’t Doing Enough to Differentiate Ads From Organic Results
The FTC published a letter today that it sent yesterday to search engine companies, warning them that they were not adequately complying with its rules on differentiating paid search advertisements and organic search results.
The FTC published a letter today that it sent yesterday to search engine companies, warning them that they were not adequately complying with its rules on differentiating paid search advertisements and organic search results.
Since it issued guidance in 2002, the commission said it has seen compliance with the rules decline. The commission has also been asked to update its guidelines that apply to Web businesses, it said.
U.S. marketers will spend roughly $19.5 billion on search advertising this year, according to eMarketer.
“Although the ways in which search engines retrieve and present results, and the devices on which consumers view these results, are constantly evolving, the principles underlying the 2002 Search Engine letter remain the same: consumers ordinarily expect that natural search results are included and ranked based on relevance to a search query, not based on payment from a third party … [C]onsumers should be able to easily distinguish a natural...
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