OPINION: I was scammed via an online advert. Is there a way to prevent these popping up?
Originally published in The i Paper 23 May 2025. Permission to publish all opinion pieces authored by Rocio Concha, sought and granted on 3 July 2025.
It’s been nearly 60 years since Pablo Picasso bemoaned computers’ ability to only provide answers. Yet, when Which? researchers took a closer look at the effectiveness of the world’s biggest search engines, we found in many cases they struggle to even do that.
At their best, adverts should be useful and relevant, helping businesses reach new customers, and consumers to find the right services for them. For that reason, thousands of UK businesses - including Which? - advertise on search engines.
But our analysis shows that the increasing volume of paid advertising on search engines is deteriorating the quality and safety of search results. We found a litany of instances where consumers are at risk of walking into the arms of scammers or leading them to unnecessary expense.
Take for instance US visa scams. Any non-US citizen will need to purchase an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) visa through the American government before travelling Stateside. This can be done via the official ESTA app and should cost $21 (£16). However, when our researchers looked for one, Google, along with its rivals, served up ads for private companies offering US visa services. One particular service charged a 466 per cent mark up. This is at best forking out more money than consumers need to, and at worst could get them turned away at the airport because they are entirely fraudulent.
Searches were based on a bank of 20 queries, with half related to products and services - for example, how to find the best air fryers or dog food - while the other half were informational searches, which included health and wellbeing questions like how to lose weight quickly, and personal finance queries.
In total, there were 520 online searches, reviewing around 5,000 individual results. In each case, researchers checked the percentage of advertising that appeared in the top 10 results, as well as the side bars and top bars across the four search engines.
Google accounts for 90 per cent of the UK search market, and is so widely used that ‘Googling’ has become shorthand for any internet search. Yet we found as many as a fifth (18%) of top Google results were adverts rather than organic results on average, which rose to around a third on certain searches - pushing down the relevant, organic results.
Given how many of us use Google, if only a small percentage of users click through onto its ads, that could still equate to potentially millions of people doing so every day.
Bing, which has a 3.94 per cent share of the UK search market, had the highest proportion of advertising of the four firms Which? examined, with nearly half (47%) of the top results being ads. A third of the top Yahoo results (33%) were ads, and one in six (16%) were ads on DuckDuckGo. Many of Yahoo’s search and ad results are provided by Bing, while ads on DuckDuckGo are also syndicated from Bing. As with Google, researchers found examples of potentially worrying or unhelpful ad results across all three sites.