Opinion. The facts cited are sourced. The conclusions are my own.

Something is happening to small complementary and integrative health businesses across Australia, the United States, and beyond — and it is not being talked about loudly enough.

Practitioners who have spent decades studying, building expertise, accumulating clinical experience, and creating genuinely useful health content are watching their businesses collapse. Not because they have done anything wrong. Not because their information is inaccurate. Not because the people they serve don’t value what they offer.

Because Google decided they shouldn’t be found.

I am one of those practitioners. I have been a functional nutritionist for nearly a decade, working with women navigating complex, unresolved chronic health conditions — the kind conventional medicine may dismisses or can’t explain. My business was built on Google search traffic. Then Google changed the rules. And I have a very specific problem with how that change is being framed.

This is not a new pattern

Before examining what has happened in recent years, it is worth understanding that Google’s tendency to use its platform power in ways that benefit pharmaceutical interests is not new.

In 2010, TechNewsWorld reported on Google’s sudden change to its AdWords policy for online pharmacies — switching from PharmacyChecker as its validation standard to the NABP’s VIPPS programme. The effect was to immediately disqualify hundreds of legitimate online pharmacies that helped consumers access affordable medications from overseas, while exclusively approving large institutional pharmacies — CVS, Walgreens, Aetna, Caremark.

Gabriel Levitt, Vice President of PharmacyChecker, said at the time: “If you look at all the media reports, if you look at all the activities of the NABP, of groups obviously funded by the pharmaceutical industry, you see they’ve been putting pressure on the search engines in ways that would benefit the big companies’ interests, which is prices.”

When asked directly whether pharmaceutical companies had pressured Google into changing its policy, Google declined to explain its reasoning. “We’re unable to share anything more beyond that,” a spokesperson said.

The pattern established then — algorithmic policy changes that benefit large pharmaceutical interests at the expense of smaller operators, with no explanation and no appeal — has been playing out at an accelerating pace ever since.

Google is not a neutral platform

In August 2024, a US federal judge ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act — finding the company had illegally maintained a monopoly in search and related advertising. This was not a close call. It was a 277-page opinion following a nine-week trial.

Central to that monopoly: Google pays Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default search engine on every iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Safari browser. This was revealed under oath during the 2023 antitrust trial.

Twenty billion dollars a year — to ensure that when people search for health information, it is Google that decides what they find.

This is not a neutral arbiter of information quality. This is a company found guilty of operating an illegal monopoly, that has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of what health information reaches the public.

Google’s financial relationship with pharmaceutical medicine

Google’s relationship with pharmaceutical medicine extends far beyond advertising.

CB Insights has documented that Google — through its parent company Alphabet and its pharma-focused ventures Verily Life Sciences, Calico Life Sciences, and Isomorphic Labs — has made over 90 investments in the pharmaceutical sector in recent years. Google and Sanofi announced a joint venture drug discovery collaboration. Four major pharmaceutical companies signed onto Verily’s Project Baseline. Google’s Project Nightingale reportedly gathered health data from millions of patients within Ascension’s health network without their knowledge — raising profound questions about who ultimately benefits from that data.

On the advertising side, the US healthcare and pharmaceutical industry was projected to spend approximately $19.66 billion on digital advertising by end of 2024 — with Google as the primary platform.

Google is not merely a search engine that occasionally carries pharmaceutical advertising. Google is a direct financial participant in pharmaceutical medicine — with investments, partnerships, joint ventures, and advertising relationships that create a profound structural alignment of financial interests between Google and the conventional pharmaceutical industry.

This context is essential when evaluating whose health information Google’s algorithm elevates — and whose it suppresses.

The algorithm changes & what they actually did

2019 — the first significant hit

In 2019, Google rolled out an algorithm update that removed many natural health and health freedom websites from organic search results — with some sites losing as much as 99% of their traffic. The sites most affected were disproportionately those offering health perspectives that diverged from conventional pharmaceutical medicine.

My website traffic dropped 42% with this change.

2024 & 2025 — the sustained assault

Google’s March 2024 and subsequent core updates devastated the broader health and wellness sector under the banner of the E-E-A-T framework — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

On paper this sounds reasonable. In practice, it functions as a credential filter that systematically elevates institutionally affiliated medical sources — hospitals, pharmaceutical-funded medical journals, government health bodies — while suppressing independent practitioners regardless of their actual expertise or clinical outcomes.

67% of health sites were significantly affected. Recovery timelines run 6-12 months — considerably longer than any other industry. For small independent practices that depend on search traffic for client acquisition, a 6-12 month revenue loss is not a disruption. It is an existential event.

A practitioner with 20 years of clinical experience, personally recovered from the conditions they treat, with extraordinary documented client outcomes — is algorithmically ranked below a pharmaceutical company’s health information page. Not because the pharmaceutical company’s information is better. Because it has institutional affiliation. Because it has the right kind of credentials in Google’s framework. Because, one might reasonably infer, it spends significantly on Google advertising.

This is not quality control. This is market protection.

Then came AI overviews — the final blow

If the algorithm changes represented a slow squeeze on complementary health practitioners, Google’s rollout of AI Overviews has been the accelerant.

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, providing a direct answer to the query without requiring the user to click through to any website. The traffic that previously went to independent health websites now stays on Google’s page.

The data on this is stark:

When AI Overviews are present, click-through rates drop to just 8% — compared to 15% for traditional search results. Organic click-through rates for informational queries have fallen 61% since mid-2024. Paid click-through rates on the same queries have fallen 68% — meaning even advertising is being undermined. 60% of all Google searches now end without any click to any website at all.

Health is the sector most comprehensively targeted. In information-driven health queries, up to 67.5% are now answered directly by AI — meaning the vast majority of health searches no longer send anyone to a website. Informational health content is experiencing 40-70% traffic drops as AI answers are deemed “good enough.”

And who does the AI draw its answers from? Institutionally credentialled medical sources. The same sources Google’s algorithm already favoured. The same industry with which Google has tens of billions of dollars in financial relationships.

The irony is not subtle. Google has built an AI that answers health questions — drawing on the institutional medical sources its algorithm has spent years elevating — and in doing so has rendered independent health websites largely invisible. The circle is complete.

Meta is doing the same thing

Google is not acting alone.

Meta — the owner of Facebook and Instagram — has implemented health content restrictions that have decimated organic reach for complementary health practitioners on social media. Posts that were reaching thousands of engaged followers organically a few years ago now reach dozens. The algorithm suppresses health content that doesn’t align with mainstream medical consensus.

The advertising picture is equally revealing. From January 2024, Google expanded its healthcare and medicines policy to treat all health-related advertising with the same restrictions as pharmaceutical advertising — requiring certification and compliance with stringent content policies that pharmaceutical companies can navigate easily but independent practitioners often cannot.

The result: organic reach is throttled. Advertising is restricted or prohibitively expensive. The health information that flows freely on these platforms is the health information that aligns with their largest pharmaceutical and medical advertisers. Everything else is algorithmically invisible.

The qualifications argument doesn’t hold

The standard defence of these changes is quality — that Google is simply elevating credentialled, evidence-based health information over misinformation.

This argument collapses quickly.

The practitioners most affected are not conspiracy theorists or misinformation spreaders. They are degree-qualified nutritionists, naturopaths, functional medicine practitioners, and integrative health specialists — many with postgraduate qualifications, professional registrations, and decades of documented clinical experience.

What Google’s algorithm rewards is not expertise. It rewards institutional alignment. A GP with a six-minute appointment and a prescription pad algorithmically outranks a functional nutritionist with 20 years of clinical experience — not because the GP’s information is more helpful, but because the GP has the right institutional affiliation.

Furthermore, in a particularly revealing asymmetry, a Harvard Kennedy School study found that Google simultaneously allowed alternative cancer clinics providing scientifically unsupported cancer treatments to spend millions on targeted advertising to vulnerable cancer patients — while applying stringent restrictions to qualified independent health practitioners advertising legitimate services.

The enforcement is selective. The direction of that selectivity is consistent.

Who is actually being harmed

The people who lose access to independent complementary health practitioners are not people with plentiful conventional alternatives. They are people who have already been through the conventional system. People whose tests came back normal when they felt far from well. People navigating complex, overlapping conditions that may not respond to pharmaceutical treatment protocols.

These are the people most in need of alternative information and perspectives — and these are precisely the people whose access is being algorithmically restricted. Directed back, again and again, to the institutional sources that have already failed to help them.

This is not a theoretical harm. It is happening to real practitioners and real patients, every day, across Australia and globally.

If you want that independent, holistic and science/research-based practitioner who listens, cares and works hard to provide their clients with personalised support that can complement allopathic medicine, then support them. Like their social media posts and comment on them, spread the word that they do exist, use alternatives to google, and give them business as appropriate.

The bigger pattern

What is happening in health is not isolated.

Big tech platforms are systematically suppressing content that competes with the interests of their largest advertisers and financial partners. In health, that means pharmaceutical medicine. In news, that means legacy media. In finance, that means institutional investment. The pattern is consistent: use algorithmic authority to define what counts as legitimate and worthy of amplification — and define it in ways that happen to align with the financial interests of the largest players in each sector.

A federal court found Google’s search monopoly illegal. The remedy imposed barely scratches the surface. Google continues to pay for preferential placement, continues to operate its pharmaceutical investment portfolio, continues to deploy AI that answers health questions from institutional sources while rendering independent health websites invisible.

And it does all of this while describing the exercise as quality control.

What I am asking for

Not immunity from scrutiny. Not the right to spread misinformation.

Honesty about what these changes actually are.

They are not neutral quality filters. They are the exercise of monopoly power — found illegal by a federal court — in the financial interests of the monopoly’s largest partners. The pattern goes back at least to 2010, when Google changed its pharmacy advertising policy in ways that benefited large pharmaceutical companies at the expense of smaller legitimate operators — and declined to explain why.

The practitioners being suppressed are largely qualified, genuinely expert, and serving populations that conventional medicine has failed. Framing their algorithmic erasure as a quality improvement exercise is not honest.

And the public — including the patients who can no longer find the practitioners who might actually help them — deserve to ask a simple question: when a company with a documented illegal monopoly and tens of billions of dollars in financial relationships with pharmaceutical medicine makes decisions about whose health information reaches the world, who does that serve?

We deserve choice, and to make our own informed decisions.

Follow the money. It leads somewhere very specific.

Nore Hoogstad is an author, as well as a Functional Nutritionist and Psych-K Practitioner based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She writes about health, systems, and the structures that shape both at writingnore.com. Her clinical practice is at gutsybynutrition.com.au.

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Sources

• TechNewsWorld, Renay San Miguel: “Has Google Cut a Backroom Deal With Big Pharma?” February 2010 — technewsworld.com
• US v Google LLC antitrust ruling, Judge Amit Mehta, August 2024 (Sherman Antitrust Act Section 2 violation)
• Google antitrust remedies order, Judge Amit Mehta, September 2025
• Google-Apple payment of approximately $20 billion annually — testimony, US antitrust trial, 2023
• CB Insights: “Big Tech Is Coming For Pharma” (2019) — Google-Sanofi joint venture, Project Nightingale, Verily Project Baseline
• CB Insights: “Analyzing Google’s pharma strategy” (2022) — 90+ pharmaceutical investments
• Statista: US healthcare & pharmaceutical digital advertising projected at $19.66 billion by end 2024
• Seer Interactive: AI Overviews Impact on Google CTR, September 2025 — 61% organic CTR decline, 68% paid CTR decline
• Pew Research: CTR of 8% with AI Overviews vs 15% without
• Evergreen Media / Semrush: health queries trigger AI Overviews in up to 67.5% of searches
• BrightEdge: 30% decline in organic clicks since AI Overviews launch
• Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review: Google allowing alternative cancer clinics to target vulnerable patients via paid search, 2025
• Matchnode: Google healthcare and medicines advertising policy expansion, January 2024