What Impact would an Apple Search Engine Make for Google and SEO

With Apple announcing recent changes for their latest iOS Spotlight Search and iPadOS 14 (Beta) along with increased crawl rates being seen from Apple’s Bots, this could be a strong indication that Apple are slowly maneuvering ahead of the launch an Apple search engine.

Google is Currently the Default Search Engine for Most Apple Device Users

It has been widely known that Google has an agreement with Apple to be the default search engine for Apple iOS users. This is thought to currently be worth somewhere in the region of $8-12 billion a year to Apple based on other reports. The agreement means that when users use Safari on an iPhone, iPad or Mac device they will by default search using Google. This can of course be changed in the Safari preferences; however, most users don’t know how to do this or choose not to change it as Google tends to produce relevant search results.

Despite this being very profitable for Apple, competition laws in the UK and EU mean that there the agreement between Apple and Google could soon come to an end. The European Union has already targeted Google for being anti-competition and their regulators could do the same with Apple, perhaps even forcing them to remove Google as the default engine.