Google learns from every click on your hotel's name. Some of those clicks go to Booking.com.
A Google search vice president acknowledged under oath that what people click helps shape its results. That includes searches for your hotel's name, and nobody outside Google knows how much each click counts.
by Markus Busch
The search for your name. Type your hotel's name into Google on your phone. Near the top sits a box of prices with booking buttons. That box mixes paid ads with free listings and runs on its own rules. Below it come the plain links: your website, your page on Booking.com, Expedia's, Tripadvisor's. A guest who has already chosen you, by name, now picks one of them. Google keeps a record of which.
What Google said under oath. On October 18, 2023, in the US government's antitrust case against Google, Justice Department lawyers questioned Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search. He confirmed that a system called Navboost "memorizes past clicks that have been issued for past queries." It is trained on user data. It holds 13 months of it, down from 18 before 2017. It sorts those clicks by location and by phone versus desktop, so a search made in London teaches it something different from the same search made in Zurich.
An internal Google deck put to him read "user feedback at the core of most search systems." Asked what user feedback meant there, he said click data.
Google's own How Search Works page says it in plainer words: the company uses "aggregated and anonymized interaction data" to judge whether results fit a search.
What Google didn't say. Judge Amit Mehta asked Nayak where Navboost sits among Google's signals. Top 10 percent? Top half? Nayak wouldn't rank it. He called it "one of the important signals," next to the words on the page, page quality, reliability and location. Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said in November 2023 that the company won't detail how it uses click signals at all. So the claim making the rounds among search marketers, that clicks have overtaken links as Google's top factor, goes further than the record does.
The catch. Nobody has published how Navboost treats a search for a hotel's name, or what a single click weighs against links, content or your Google Business Profile. The testimony describes the plain web links, not the price box, and it dates from 2023; Google may have changed the system since. What follows is a reading of documented machinery. It is not a measurement.
What it means for your hotel. A search for your name is the one search where the guest has already picked you. Where they click next is behavior Google stores for 13 months, sorted by where they searched from. When the click lands on Booking.com's page for your hotel, that is part of the record too.
The Monday test. Ask whoever runs your website for the Google Search Console report on searches containing your hotel's name. It shows how often your site appeared for those searches and how many people clicked through. Then search your own name on a phone. Read the two lines under your link, then the two lines under Booking.com's, and ask which one gives a guest a reason to click.
The guest typed your name. Google remembers where they went next.
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