Survey: User satisfaction with Google grows in 2024
Americans are more satisfied with Google Search than a year ago, according to the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Search and Social Media Study 2024.
Why we care. Many search marketers and news publishers have complained about various aspects of Google Search becoming worse in recent years, especially over the past couple of years (for example, due to various algorithm updates and the arrival of AI Overviews). However, surprisingly (shockingly?) this survey indicates that the perception of Google hasn’t changed among the masses.
Google user satisfaction increase. Google remains the leading search engine. Its ACSI score increased to 81, up from 80 in 2023.
2002-2023. Google’s ACSI score has varied through the years.
- Google’s high was 86 in 2008 and 2009.
- Google’s low was 75, in 2022.
Other search engines. Overall, search engine satisfaction remained unchanged from last year, with an ASCI score of 80.
- DuckDuckGo’s score (79) remained unchanged from last year.
- Microsoft Bing’s score increased to 77 (from 75) while Yahoo increased to 76 (from 74).
But. In an unrelated survey, Americans said they were frustrated that they are spending more time searching for services online today than five years ago. Dig deeper in Survey: 54% of people look through more search results vs. 5 years ago.
Social ad experience concern. Advertising was “the worst part” of customer experience on social media platforms (in four areas: ability to use a site without ad disruption; balance between ad and non-ad content; trustworthiness of ads; and personal relevance of ads seen), according to ACSI:
- “Respondents rate their encounters with advertising on social medial platforms as the worst part of the customer experience. New ACSI benchmarks about the trustworthiness and personal relevance of advertising content have emerged as particular user concerns.”
Social media satisfaction improves. Overall, social media satisfaction improved to 74, marking three straight years of improvement. A couple of interesting takeaways from the survey:
- TikTok became the industry leader in satisfaction, with a score of 78, beating out YouTube (77).
- Meta’s Facebook and Instagram both increased user satisfaction by three points.
About the survey. ACSI calls itself a “national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States.” Results are based on 8,940 completed surveys by customers chosen at random, contacted via email, between July 2023 and June 2024.
Several “experience benchmarks” were taken into account in the survey, including:
- Ease of navigation
- Ease of using the site on different devices
- Variety of services and information.
- Freshness of content
- Amount of ads on site