So Google says, the reason for the switch is to provide “extra protection” for searchers. Search Engine Land, however, suspects that Google may also be attempting to block NSA spying activity — since Google was accused of giving the National Security Agency access to its search data back in June (which it has strongly denied). We also can’t help but think that, because Google is encrypting search activity for everything but ad clicks, this is a move to get more people using Google AdWords.

What All This Means

Okay … so what does all this mean to you, the marketer? First, here’s a quick recap of how we got here …

You may recall that back in October 2011, Google (citing the reason of privacy), announced it would start encrypting search results for logged-in Google users (including any Google-owned product like YouTube, Google+, Gmail, etc.). This meant that marketers were no longer able to identify which keywords a person who was logged into Google.com searched for before they arrived at your website — even if they were using a web or marketing analytics platform. And without these keyword insights, marketers would have a much tougher time knowing which keywords to target to achieve greater visibility in search. No bueno.

While Google initially said this would impact less than 10% of all searches conducted, we quickly noticed that percentage rise. In November 2011, we analyzed the keywords to find that more than 11% of organic search traffic was being affected, and by January of this year, we’d found that for the HubSpot website specifically, about 55% of the organic search we got each month was encrypted(and we’d seen that percentage steadily rising by about 4 percentage points each month). Things appeared to be getting more serious.

And other webmasters have been reporting a similar lack of insight. Not Provided Count, which tracks 60 sites to chart the rise of the keyword “(not provided),” has been reporting on the effects of encrypted keywords over time. In the chart below, you’ll notice a spike starting around the week of September 4. Today, the chart indicates that nearly 74% of search terms are being encrypted.

With Google encrypting all keyword data, this means marketers will not just lose some of their Google keyword insights — they’ll lose all of them. While there are still a lot of unanswered questions that Google has yet to address (for instance, when will we lose all this data?), there’s still a lot of cause for concern for marketers. How will we know how searchers are finding our websites? How will this affect our content strategies?

What You Can Do