When Google Altered Its Ad Rules, Charities Paid the Price

In July 2023, Google said it would no longer restrict advertisers from using trademarks that belong to other organizations.

That change quickly became a headache for nonprofits that buy Google search ads to find donors. Other outfits, they discovered, were using their trademarks in order to draw internet traffic.

Samaritan’s Purse, a nonprofit that aids victims of natural disasters, found itself with new competition in the split-second auctions that determine which ads appear atop Google search results. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital competed with obscure search engines eager to bring more users to their sites. And misleading ads about U.N.H.C.R., the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, proliferated on Google’s search results, according to data from SpyFu and Semrush, two sites that track digital ads.

The pattern illustrated the unintended effects of Google’s policy changes and how obscure changes made to its advertising rules can have outsize repercussions on groups dependent on the world’s biggest search engine. In this case, nonprofits were forced to compete with companies that could better afford Google’s ad rates.

The conflict also cuts to the heart of concerns by regulators around the world that Google has simply grown too powerful. The company was ruled to be an illegal monopoly in search last year. By August, a federal judge will decide what changes it must make to foster a more competitive search market. In a separate case, a federal judge is expected to rule soon on whether Google violated antitrust law with a monopoly in advertising technology, the types of tools that place ads across the web.

Google said it made the policy change on trademarks as part of its effort to comply with Europe’s Digital Services Act, a multipronged law that requires tech companies to police their platforms more aggressively and stop ads that are targeted to users based on their identity.