How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results (2024 Edition)

In the Academy Award-nominated Food Inc, filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals how the extensive range of products we see on supermarket shelves is actually controlled by just a handful of companies.

Today I’m going to expand on my research into how the seemingly diverse list of websites in Google search results are often owned by just a few brands, and exactly what you can learn from those brands in question.

I first covered this topic in 2016, resulting in the most successful article I’ve ever published. Seven years later, it was still mentioned weekly in tweets, Facebook groups, and newsletters, prompting a 2023 follow-up read by over 50,000 people.

Many of the leading websites in that initial report are still dominant today, but the companies behind them and how they operate have massively evolved, so today I’m excited to bring you the result of weeks of work and share their exact status right now in 2024.

If you wonder where SEO and publishing content online is heading in the age of AI, there’s probably no one better to track and analyse than the companies whose search engine rankings are worth billions of dollars.

The 16 Companies Google Sends a Combined 3 Billion+ Clicks Per Month

The 16 companies in this report are behind at least 588 individual brands.

Combined, Semrush estimates they pick up around 3.5 billion clicks from Google each month. An average of 5.9 million monthly clicks per site.

This report is not an attempt to track every single brand doing well in Google.

I’m primarily focused on networks with sites in a variety of niches (such as Pets, Tech, Food and Sports) that typically publish English-language content.

Many are incredibly financially successful, in no small part due to the traffic search engines like Google send their way. You’ll likely search for something today where they’ll be on the first page of results.

I think there’s a ton we can learn from them, but first they need an introduction. A graphic seemed like the best fit:

This might look overwhelming, and yet it doesn’t come close to the almost 600 sites we’ve analysed for them.

While we track more sites for each brand than they put on their portfolio pages, we may have excluded sites for primarily being written in other languages or if they’re essentially placeholder domains for job openings or similar. You can find more information on the sites and brands we purposefully didn’t include in this supplemental Google Doc.

Combining estimated traffic numbers for each website, we can also rank each brand accordingly.

These numbers will never be perfect but this should give a good idea of their overall size.

While Dothdash Meredith isn’t too far behind Fandom, we only track 14 websites for Fandom, but forty-nine for Dotdash Meredith. Of course, it helps that Fandom.com is by far the most popular domain we track overall.

Speaking of popular domains…

The 20 Biggest Sites They’re Behind, Ranked Ascending by Estimated Monthly Search Traffic

These estimates are provided by Semrush for January of 2024, with overall rankings compared to February of 2023, and only take into account traffic from search engines.

There are two sites here where people might have differing views on the ownership of: MayoClinic and Goal, and I will explain why later in this report. If you prefer they were excluded (that’s totally fine), the two sites at the top of the table would have been Southern Living from Dotdash Meredith and Cnet from Red Ventures.

Five sites no longer in the top twenty that were in 2023 are Esquire, Collider, WomensHealthMag, USMagazine and Cnet.

Three of the top four sites being in the health space brings back memories of how many people I knew profiting wildly before Google got more serious around YMYL (Your Money Your Life) topics.

Hopefully this gives you a better insight into the huge brands they’re behind.

Just How Dominant They Are in Google’s Search Results: We Have the Data

It should be clear from search traffic estimates alone that these brands are ranking very well for a lot of keyphrases.

If we overlay the relevant parent company onto some high-value queries, it becomes apparent that many Google search results aren’t technically as diverse as they initially seem.

You may know I regularly update our report looking at who ranks across 10,000 hand-picked affiliate keyphrases.

I revealed that just three companies were behind 36 of the top 100 domains overall. This report also features those three companies: Dotdash Meredith, Hearst, and Future.

I decided it would be interesting to recheck all of those search results to see how often a site owned by one of these 16 companies ranks.

Across 10,000 terms where affiliates are ranking, which cover products in every niche you can think of (home, beauty, tech, automotive, cooking, travel, sports, education and many more), these 16 companies ranked on the first page of 8,574 (or 85%) of them.

That’s not all.

In 1,584 of 10,000 search results they claimed four or more of the first 10 organic rankings.

The most dominant brand was Dotdash Meredith, with its websites appearing in 6,788 search results. It was followed by Hearst (5,144 search results), Future (4,408 search results), and Condé Nast (3,734 search results).

The 16 companies are actually present in fewer search results than last year, but the top four brands are present in more search results than last year.

Correction: After noticing we ran the numbers incorrectly when only a single goliath ranked, we had to increase the number of search results they dominate above.

Our data shows the likes of Reddit and Quora – huge brands in their own right – have picked up many of remaining available spots.

As we recently revealed, Reddit is currently the number one affiliate review domain on the planet, and the most dominant website in Google’s ‘Discussions and forums’ SERP feature.

Still, even with their presence reduced, it’s very easy to find these 16 companies taking over search results. It’s still harder to find them not ranking.

Depending on the vertical, you might see the top few results all taken by a single one of them.

Towards the end of 2023 I performed our most extensive analysis of search results yet, looking at 250,000 keyphrases where content-focused sites were more likely to rank.

Even as someone reporting on this topic for years, I was surprised by the results: When a content-focused site ranked first across 186,444 Google search results, 86.1% of the time it was owned by a large media brand. A “digital goliath”.

The sixteen companies in this report owned 12 of the top 20 content sites and 7 of the top 10. That’s some real domination across a considerable portion of English-language results.

Now you know who the companies are and how dominant they’ve become, let’s see what we can learn from them.

31 Specific Insights from Tracking Every Aspect of Their Content & Operations

Most of the insights below are from what I can see on the surface of a website or from trawling through interviews and press releases. There’s enough wisdom to share just focusing on that.

I will not reveal anything private or “blackhat” they may be doing, even though I consider large brands and public companies fair game.

I’m just focused on the interesting things I think we can learn from — most of which (as you’ll see) they proudly promote. I won’t get into specific link-building tactics because I’m not the Google police, and don’t think I need to be to make this report valuable.

I genuinely believe these are some of the most interesting brands on the planet to watch – especially if you care about SEO – and we’re pretty lucky they love to give interviews, write investor updates and share news about what they’re working on.

Let’s get going…

Digital Trends Media Group Has Gone Quiet, But They Now Own the Number One Tech News Site in the US

In 2022, Digital Trends Media Group shared seven updates about their business in their ‘Press Room’.

In 2023, they didn’t share any.

Coupled with the fact that some of the brands they feature on the site didn’t publish a single article in 2023 (TheAngle, Toughjobs & Blissmark), it may make you question the future of their business.

Fortunately, their flagship brand Digital Trends is still as popular as ever, and was just awarded the title of the #1 tech news site in the US for 2024, according to third-party media firm Comscore.

Their Editor-in-Chief gave an interview on hitting that goal, making comments like:

Strategy-wise, we are going to stay the course, but throw some fuel on the fire. We’re enjoying the gains from the groundwork of simplification and focus that we laid years ago, and I want to maintain this momentum. I want to be able to go even deeper into the existing topics that we cover, and reach out to that same kind of audience in more places. We want to be available to readers wherever they want to consume our content. So while we will stay true to our roots and expertise in tech topics, I would love to expand on social media, through newsletters, and possibly totally new avenues.

He also touched on AI, but more about how the technology might impact our lives in the future, rather than how it might impact Digital Trends as a brand.

It wouldn’t be Detailed if I didn’t go into more depth on this one, because there are two little aspects of the Digital Trends website I really like.

First of all, I love that they go to the level of detail where specific categories have their own editor.

It’s such a small thing but if you’re passionate about a brand and particularly a specific section of their website, I would imagine this helps build some form of relationship with the site you keep coming back to.

How many websites could you name off the top of your head that do this?

Another touch I like is how they style related posts at the end of an article.

Instead of related articles being a list of link cards, they fade into the beginning of each article, giving you a teaser of what you’re about to read. Once again, it’s a subtle, small thing, but I’ve seen it in use on a few of their sites and I’m a fan.

This screenshot doesn’t do it justice since there are multiple posts stacked in a row that look like this, rather than a single one.

Finally, I can’t forget to mention I love how much detail they put into their design at times. Just look at the styling of this category:

There’s a list of articles if you scroll past that header. The page almost looks like the introduction to a Netflix show.

Of course, you don’t have to go to these lengths to be successful in Google, but they continue to be one of my favourite brands to monitor.

Two Specific Things Future Are Doing To Grow Affiliate Revenue (Both Were Mentioned on A Recent Earnings Call As Working Well)

If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn you’ll know I’ve now read and listened-in on hundreds of earnings calls, particularly from digital-first brands.

I never miss an update from Future, and their latest update was especially interesting, particularly because they highlighted two specific things they’re doing to grow affiliate revenue.

The first is that they started adding “Buy If” and “Don’t Buy If” boxes to their product reviews, and are now rolling these out to more sites.

Here’s an example of how those look:

They previously had a bit more colour to them which I preferred, but they’re still pretty prominent throughout their reviews.

The second thing they mentioned as working well is news surge content, taking the angle of “buy this thing before it’s no longer available”.

It definitely helps that they pick up a lot of traffic that isn’t keyword focused, but they can tie this approach back to terms to rank for as well.

This is the specific example they shared on their earnings call, but you can see they repeat this angle often across most sites in their network.

Affiliate Revenue is Crucial For The Other Brands As Well, So Here’s Some Ways They’re Trying to Stand Out

Anyone who’s searched for a product review has likely seen a site owned by one of these sixteen companies populate their results.

You’re probably aware they write a lot of Best [product] of 2024 content, but you might not be aware of the other ways they promote their affiliate links.

One smart touch from Allure is to show recommended product picks, right in the middle of category pages.

This isn’t something you typically see, yet is used on several sites in the Condé Nast network.

To reiterate, a standard category page is usually just a list of links, but this one has a prominent affiliate CTA right in the middle of it.

There’s a lot to like about Elite Daily’s design – even if it’s not one you would ever try to replicate yourself – and how they brand their affiliate section is no exception.

I love the “What’s the deal with?” angle and how that is peppered throughout. From its own dedicated page to subtle references to it on every review:

Using headlines like “I Tried X and X Happened” also makes the review more memorable and trustworthy than a typical best products list. At least to me.

The Strategist section of Vox Media’s NY Mag also does something unique.

Not only do they quickly show you at a glance how many products are being featured, but there’s a smart sense of urgency tied to how many of those items are currently part of a sale.

I would be curious to know if this tends to increase their conversion rate with people not wanting to miss out on a deal.

Condé Nast’s Glamour magazine does something interesting: They double up their homepage navigation bar and highlight more general product topics.

If I’m honest, I don’t think this looks great and feel it “cheapens” their homepage design, but it must work well.

Another Condé Nast brand, GQ, can use the traffic coming to their site directly and via channels like email and social media to make sales that don’t have a keyword focus.

I thought this angle was quite smart, mainly because it can be (and is) updated every month.

If you spend time clicking around GQ, you’ll see many non-keyword-focus angles like this they regularly update.

There are a few more unique angles I saw which are already in SEO Blueprint, but those are some of the main ones which recently caught my eye.

The Collaboration I Never Saw Happening (But Makes Total Sense): Hearst and Vox Media Are Working Together on Puzzles

In my second quarterly report on the playbook of Digital Goliaths, Detailed Q2, I mentioned how Hearst is taking on other media brands with their puzzle site, Puzzmo.

Hearst is the publisher behind brands like Cosmopolitan and Elle, and they’ve likely seen the success that Puzzles and Crosswords have had for The New York Times, The Independent and The Guardian newspapers.

I had previously reported how around 10 million people each week visit The New York Times website to play games.

I don’t know about you, but those numbers are higher than I would have guessed.

What I hadn’t considered is that Hearst would open up Puzzmo to allow other brands to have their own sections on the site, and I think it’s a brilliant move.

First of all, it stops media goliath competitors from being as likely to build out their own solution. It also grows the brand awareness of Puzzmo as a whole, and builds their relationship with other media brands if that’s ever on their agenda.

One recent new partner of Puzzmo is Polygon, a brand under Vox Media ownership.

I’ve probably taken some liberties with the headline of this section by saying the two companies have partnered up, but Hearst owns the Puzzmo platform, and Vox’s Polygon is heavily promoting its presence there.

The Polygon-branded section of the site was launched with commentary on how they might benefit:

While you can play for free, a subscription to Puzzmo Plus allows a game’s scores to ladder into daily, weekly, and monthly leaderboards so you can compete against friends, family or, perhaps, fellow readers of this very publication.

I presume Vox will get a decent cut of the $40/yr subscription price for anyone who becomes a paid subscriber.

The partnership was only announced in December of 2023 so it will be interesting to see if they’re still pushing it a year from now, and whether any other Vox Media sites follow suit.

If You Haven’t Been to Red Ventures’ Cnet in a While, It Might Be Worth Checking Out (Their Redesign Went Live This Week)

I won’t claim to be a regular reader of Cnet, nor do I have any insights on whether they get their hands on every product they promote.

That said, after spending some time on the Red Ventures brand recently, I was impressed by several elements throughout its site.

As I was about to hit publish on this 2024 report, they went live with a new homepage and look, which was a total coincidence and not why I was writing this section.

Instead, I had actually wanted to show you how they handle all of the different parts of product review pages.

Take a look:

Of course, 48 hours after I put together this graphic, they redesigned their site. The elements annotated above are still there — they just have a darker design.

Not all of these elements are unique to Cnet of course, but they’ve been blended together in a really aesthetic way.

Some are just smart to have, like the call to action that follows you as you scroll. If you’re an SEO Blueprint member, you will have seen me mention some other sites that do this.

Another thing I like about their site is that different content types are styled entirely differently.

A product review, a list of the best banking apps and a report on the features of a new tech product look nothing alike. If you’re a fan of the brand already then there won’t be much that’s new to you, but if it’s not part of your usual online visits, I recommend taking a quick look.

When You Can Rank for Anything, What Keywords Do You Target? Wordle Answers, Among Other Things

It’s an interesting scenario: You have a network of sites with enough authority to stand a good chance of ranking for most topics you cover, so what should you be writing about?

For many of the 16 companies, one obvious choice is the answers to Wordle, the popular game The New York Times acquired in January of 2022.

There are more examples than I put on this screenshot but here’s a few of them that appear on page one and two of Google:

Future alone share daily answers to Wordle on:

• Tom’s Guide
• TechRadar
• PCGamer
• GamesRadar

And I’m sure many more, but I had to get back to writing this report before scrolling through many more search results.

Before I continue, I want to be clear that I’m not judging these brands for this tactic.

If Ahrefs estimates are even close to accurate, there are 3.5 million searches every month for ‘Wordle today’, and that’s not even including any variants, of which there are many.

People want the answers, and these sites are providing them. It’s probably some of the easiest ad revenue they make, but it seems like a fair deal to me.

As someone who has spent more than half of his life looking at search results, I find this question interesting: What topics should you cover when you can rank for anything (within reason)?

And in specific scenarios like this, should you create a new page each day or update a single page daily? (Hint: Both are prevalent, but one page that gets updated often seems to be the best approach, even if it makes for some confusing comment sections).

If you’re ever in the position of owning or working on sites with such authority in the eyes of Google, it’s worth going through the type of content these brands are publishing because I think a lot of it would surprise you.

Trending Nav Bars Are As Popular As Ever (And Great for Market Research)

One design element common on the brands owned by digital goliaths, but not so much by sites with independent owners, is the trending navigation bar element.

Valnet’s TheGamer has as simple an example as you can imagine, but it’s prominent on every page of their site:

Pocket-lint, another Valnet brand, takes a very similar approach:

Fit&Well from Future implement a similar style, but this time they don’t take positioning away from the standard navigational links like the above examples:

Then there’s a site like Gamespot, where the links aren’t marked as trending but all point to articles that have been updated recently:

Other brands where this kind of bar is in place include:

• Digital Trends (Digital Trends Media Group)
• Collider (Valnet)
• BGR (Penske)
• Tom’s Guide (Future)
• PC Mag (Ziff Davis)
• Digital Spy (Hearst)

If a brand uses it on one of its sites, you can likely find it on many more. For instance, Future has these trending bars on over 30 of their brands.

Trending topics shouldn’t dictate the entirety of your keyword and content research but they can be a great source of inspiration for what you might write next.

How Much Money Is There in Dominating Google? If You’re Ziff Davis, Up to One Billion Dollars A Year

I originally started this “Companies dominating Google” series back in 2016 because I was fascinated by how Google allowed companies to quickly turn one website into multiple and dominate countless search results.

One primary reason I’m still excited to follow them today is because I want to know how well they’re performing from a business perspective, especially in a time when people are a little more fearful about the future of SEO.

As only some of these companies are public we don’t have accurate revenue numbers for all of them, but I can share some insights from what I was able to find.

Keep in mind of course that revenue is not profit, and not every company making a lot of money is thriving.

Here’s an important disclaimer for everything said below: I will source my data and I’ve done the research but please do your own if you’re using these figures to make any decisions (especially as a few of them are public companies). Many of these are estimates.

Here are the most recent numbers I was able to find:

Unfortunately, we don’t have any up-to-date estimates for Penske, Accelerate 360, Digital Trends or Valnet. Digital Trends was last reported to be making $30M in revenue with $8-10M in profit, but that was back in 2016.

Ziff Davis, behind brands like IGN, PCMag and RetailMeNot, reported digital media revenue of $1Bn for 2023.

Of course, search traffic is not their only source of website visitors, which is where the ‘up to’ in the headline comes from.

As I say, not all companies will be profitable, but I hope these numbers give you a small sense of how lucrative search traffic can be.

If You Need Some Inspiration for Stylish Internal Linking, I’ve Got You Covered

Internal linking has become an increasingly popular topic in SEO in recent years, which is a little bit strange as it has been a thing since the dawn of websites. How else would people find other pages of your site?

Of course, I get it: As websites get bigger and the topics they cover become more diverse, it can be hard to “keep up” with remembering to both link to past articles and update the links from them.

I don’t view the following examples as replacements for great in-content links, but they can be smart ways to show crawlers and users additional sections of your site.

On certain categories of Digital Trends, where relevant, they have clean links to additional subcategories:

Articles on Hearst’s Bicycling.com have an extra navigation bar with clear links to other posts on the site:

If you’re on a PCMag article which has several similar but more specific alternatives, they link to them nicely with a Related bar:

I get that there’s nothing particularly remarkable about each example, but keep in mind that category pages on most sites on the web have nothing more than a list of their latest articles.

Here are the 18 (+1) Dotdash Meredith Brands That Receive “Nearly 100% of Our Investment in Content & Technology”

In their Q3 2023 earnings release, IAC’s Dotdash Meredith revealed there are 19 core brands which drive 80% of their website traffic and receive almost all of their content and technology investments.

Their earnings release mentioned nineteen companies but only listed eighteen, so I contacted their investor support for an update.

They revealed the missing ‘core’ site from their update was Health.com, leaving the following as their complete list of primary brands (in alphabetical order):

1. AllRecipes
2. Better Homes & Gardens
3. Byrdie
4. EatingWell
5. Food & Wine
6. Health.com
7. InStyle
8. Investopedia
9. Martha Stewart
10. Parents.com
11. People
12. Real Simple
13. SeriousEats
14. Southern Living
15. SimplyRecipes
16. The Spruce
17. Travel & Leisure
18. Verywell Health
19. Verywell Mind

Interestingly, they referred to sites not in the list above as having “experienced pronounced traffic declines [..] and represent a small (and declining) portion of our revenue”.

Presumably this means brands like TreeHugger, The Balance, Brides.com and Lifewire.

As a Reminder, Your Headline Can Be a Lot More Personal Than Your Title Tag, and Digital Goliaths Know This Better Than Anyone

I have to be careful with what I’m about to say because I understand you can “break the rules” when you have as much authority as the brands we’re covering.

That, and I don’t want you to start messing around with title tags for well-ranking pages or on pages that don’t need any help.

Still, what I’m about to share seems far more common on authority sites than niche sites, so I wanted to show how Goliaths change their headlines to be far more personal than their title tags.

As a perfect example, Vox Media’s The Cut has an enticing title tag for search engine results and a more personal headline atop its article.

Some more examples I came across during this research include: