Greg Tingle Promotions Blog
Organic Search Results
Organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pay per click advertisements, shopping results, or other results where the search engine is paid either for showing the result, or for clicks on the result.
Background
The Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Petal and Sogou search engines insert advertising on their search results pages. In U.S. law, advertising must be distinguished from organic results. This is done with various differences in background, text, link colors, and/or placement on the page. However, a 2004 survey found that a majority of search engine users could not distinguish the two
Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew Research Center) realized that many of the highest placed "results" on search engine results pages (SERPs) were ads, the search engine optimization industry began to distinguish between ads and natural results. The perspective among general users was that all results were, in fact, "results." So the qualifier "organic" was invented to distinguish non-ad search results from ads. It has been used since at least 2004.
