IndexWatch: SEO Winners in Google US Search 2024

From:

Lily Ray

Published: 17.01.2025

2024 Search Summary

In addition to the changes relating to AI, Google also launched and implemented various new spam policies, improved ranking systems, and a major focus on elevating forums and user-generated content, which caused massive volatility in the search results.

In this report, you’ll find the SISTRIX annual winners list and analysis of some of the more interesting gains throughout 2024. The winners are broken up into categories based on the type of site and/or the type of SEO approach that lead to significant year-over-year gains in visibility.

AI Overviews & Gemini: Google’s continued focus on AI & competition with Bing/OpenAI

The biggest change to SEO in 2024 was undoubtedly Google’s launch of AI Overviews, formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE) on May 14, 2024. AI Overviews was formally rolled out after being announced at Google IO, and despite a rocky start, Google continued improving and expanding its rollout throughout 2024. Toward the back half of the year, Google had expanded AIO to over 100 countries, reaching most regions across the world, except the Middle East and continental Europe. 

Google also continued to innovate Gemini, with the launch of Gemini 2.0 toward the end of 2024. This multimodal AI model is designed to enhance autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Google also previewed Project Astra and Project Mariner, which assist with real-time AI assistance and web navigation. 
At the end of the year, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, indicated that “the stakes are high” for 2025, and Google needs to be “relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of [AI] and solve real user problems.”

The rise of user-generated content and forums

Another big change to SEO in 2024, continuing from a trend that started in mid-2023, was the massive rise in SEO visibility among forums and user-generated content. This trend began after Google announced it would be prioritizing “Hidden Gems” in the search results. Several of the greatest visibility winners fell into this category.

Google ramped up visibility of a new SERP feature, called “What People Are Saying,” which seems to be an extension of similar features from the past, such as “Perspectives” and “Forums.” This SERP feature exhibits social media posts, forum discussions, videos, and blog content highlighting different user perspectives on a given topic. This is yet another example of how Google is showcasing more first-hand experience from user-generated content directly in the search results.

Implementation of aggressive spam policies & manual actions

One of the most significant SEO developments in 2024 was Google’s announcement, and followed implementation, of 3 new types of spam violations: Scaled Content Abuse, Site Reputation Abuse, and Expired Domain Abuse. The implementation of these spam policies followed other aggressive algorithm updates and automated measures that dramatically reduced the organic rankings and visibility of affected websites, such as the March 2024 Core Update.

Biggest Domain Winners of SEO Visibility in 2024

Listed below are the top 100 winning domains of 2024 in US search followed by sector-by-sector analysis

Biggest winners in terms of absolute visibility increases:

Biggest winners in terms of percentage visibility increases:

User generated content sites & forums

Just like in 2024, one of the most salient trends among the list of winning sites is the growth of sites containing user-generated content, especially among forum websites.

Reddit.com was once again the biggest absolute winner of SEO visibility in 2024, increasing by 1,274 points throughout the year, making it 3rd greatest visibility holder in the United States. For reference, Reddit was the #92 biggest visibility site in the U.S. at the start of 2023. Reddit has surged in rankings and visibility for all types of keywords throughout the year, making it an unexpected SEO competitor for most types of online businesses, especially comparison and product review websites.

Another popular UGC site, HubPages, saw tremendous visibility growth toward the end of 2024, primarily driven by its Discover subdomain (discover.hubpages.com).

HubPages’ “Discover” subdomain jumped in visibility during the August 2024 Core Update, and again with the November 2024 Core Update. This subdomain contains thousands of articles submitted by guest contributors, many of which appear to leverage AI-generated content and stock photography.

The table below drills into the keywords where HubPages’ Discover subdomain gained traffic and visibility between July 2024 and December 2024:

Throughout the latter half of 2024, HubPages Discover secured top organic rankings across a wide range of topics, including pet content, music, quotes, jokes, and popular names. Interestingly, many of these articles resemble low-quality content that often causes demotion by Google’s algorithm updates targeting spammy content. This suggests Google’s algorithms may put more weight on prioritizing UGC websites like HubPages, which contain authentic human experiences and contributions, over penalizing or demoting individual articles included on those sites.

This growth appears to have been tied to a larger trend of Google increasing visibility to forum and UGC websites. All 6 websites shown below saw substantial visibility growth throughout 2024 (continued from 2023), and each site is rich with forum discussions, conversations with experts, and/or and user-submitted content.

Ecommerce domains

Many major ecommerce sites saw significant visibility gains throughout 2024.

Many of these ecommerce websites had seen visibility declines throughout mid-2022 until the end of 2023, but have steadily climbed back throughout 2024.

Carters.com, which saw substantial growth in the second half of the year, earned the #1 position for many high-volume commercial keywords, including “baby clothes,” “kids clothing store” and “childrens clothes.” Drilling down into these position changes between April and December of 2024 reveals that many of these terms saw URL changes, indicated by the red exclamation point in the URL column. This could indicate that the site underwent a platform migration or other type of website overhaul that resulted in URLs changing, which might have contributed to its substantial SEO growth throughout the year.

Programmatic SEO strategies that leverage AI:

For some of the winners, visibility growth stemmed from a “programmatic SEO” strategy, which use automation to scale pages that target many different search queries relevant to the site’s core offerings. For example, the site ck12.org, which claims to be the “world’s most powerful AI tutor,” has seen substantial visibility growth, predominantly stemming from its ‘flexbooks’ subdomain and ‘/flexi’ subfolders:

The most visible directories are shown in the image below.

These pages appear to use the site’s own AI product to provide helpful answers to common search queries, such as metric and temperature conversions:

Example of a top ranking article:

Another site using a similar approach is Quillbot.com, an AI detection and productivity tool that has seen a 490% increase in visibility throughout 2024:

Significant keyword rankings are shown below:

Quillbot’s top-ranking pages contain AI tools for translations, paraphrasing, grammar checks and more, and it appears to have dedicated pages for each of the language translations it offers:

These examples demonstrate how programmatic SEO can still be effective when the content is helpful and useful for visitors, and not implemented in a way that could risk being flagged by Google’s new “Scaled Content Abuse” spam policies.

Travel & Hotels

Various sites focused on travel guidance, hotels, and flights are among the 2024 winner list for various reasons:

• Site migrations & website mergers (Virgin Airlines, Hardrock)
• Absorbing top-rankings lost by travel blogs affected by Google’s algorithm updates, such as the Helpful Content Update
• Improving and expanding high-quality content targeting popular search terms, such as Marriott’s /destination/ pages

Marriott.com saw a 172.3% visibility increase throughout 2024, largely stemming from its /destinations/ pages.

Hardrock saw significant organic visibility growth when it consolidated several sites and site sections onto one domain (hardrock.com).

Similarly, the Virgin Airlines website appears to have migrated its UK version into its US (.com) version, generating greater overall visibility than when the sites were operated separately.

Government Sites

Many government sites were among the 2024 winner’s list, with the greatest overall winner being cancer.gov with a 48 point increase in visibility. 

Most of cancer.gov’s growth stemmed from its dictionary section, which provides trustworthy definitions for medical and cancer-related terminology. These pages frequently rank in position 1:

Social Media Sites

As with previous years, several major social media sites also saw significant growth. While this is a yearly pattern due to the sites’ overall size growing over time, Instagram and YouTube, in particular, appeared to benefit from increased SEO visibility toward the end of 2024. 

• instagram.com
• youtube.com
• facebook.com

Twitter.com also migrated to x.com toward the end of 2024, ultimately earning back its prior visibility levels:

Recipe Sites

Several major recipe sites appeared on the winner list this year, with at least 4 sites seeing a massive increase in organic visibility in October 2024. Interestingly, this date fell outside of a confirmed Google core update:

Music Sites

Another sector of domains that showed substantial growth throughout 2024 was music websites: sites containing audio players, lyrics, playlists, and information about individual artists and performers.

The greatest winner in this category was Spotify, which greatly benefitted from the August 2024 Core Update, and saw just under 300 new visibility points throughout 2024:

Most of Spotify’s big gains came from its artist, album, and/or track pages earning top 10 positions for high-volume names of musicians or celebrities. For example, Spotify earned top 10 rankings for the below keywords, which each have monthly search volumes of 500,000 or greater:

Below is an example of how Spotify moved into position 4 for the keyword “Scarlett Johansson” by the end of 2024, after not ranking anywhere in the top 20 for that keyword earlier in the year:

Google’s behavioral data may have determined that these Spotify pages provide a top experience for searchers looking for the names of musical artists, which led to higher rankings for these keywords across the board.

Conclusion

2024 marked a transformative year in SEO, primarily driven by Google’s aggressive push into AI technology and a focus on elevating forums and user-generated content.

The launch of AI Overviews (formerly SGE) in May 2024 and subsequent release of Gemini 2.0 signaled Google’s commitment to AI integration, while Google’s organic search results simultaneously elevated the visibility of forums and user-generated content sites. This shift was most notably demonstrated by Reddit’s remarkable performance, which saw a 190.9% increase in visibility throughout 2024, making it the third most visible site in Google’s US search results by the year’s end.

The year’s visibility winners spanned diverse categories, with particularly strong performances in e-commerce, travel, and government sectors. Major ecommerce retailers like Lenovo, eBay, and Nike saw significant gains, while some travel sites benefited from strategic site migrations and content improvements. Government websites also performed well, led by Cancer.gov’s 48-point visibility increase. 

Successful strategies occasionally involved programmatic SEO leveraging AI, as demonstrated by platforms like ck12.org and quillbot.com, along with successful site consolidations and migrations, and an emphasis on comprehensive, authoritative content.

Notably, several specialized sectors emerged as surprising winners throughout the year. A handful of authoritative recipe sites experienced a collective surge in October 2024, while music-related platforms, particularly Spotify, saw substantial growth following the August 2024 Core Update. 

The above trends, combined with the strong performance of user-generated content platforms like Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange and GitHub, suggest a shift in Google’s ranking preferences toward sites offering authentic, user-driven experiences and specialized, authoritative content.