Google Search is a Problem: How Google is Crushing Tuta.

[Aklima@42]

We, Tutao GmbH, have filed a DMA complaint with the EU because Google is destroying the visibility of our product Tuta Mail via search results. Google, in its role as gatekeeper, is affecting the profits and marketing of our private email service Tuta Mail, a direct competitor to Google's Gmail, which is against the Digital Markets Act. We now call on Google to put an end to this illegal de-ranking of our website in search results, and we ask the EU to examine this unfair practice in the course of its investigation into Google's compliance with the DMA.

At the beginning of March 2024, our website tuta.com was removed from the Google Search rankings – a change that caught us by surprise, as we had not changed anything on our website. As a result, our website no longer appeared as a possible search result for thousands of keywords, but only for a few hundred.

We, the German company Tutao GmbH, develop and market Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar. Our encrypted email provider was launched under the name Tutanota in 2014 (tutanota.com) and was rebranded to Tuta Mail with the new website tuta.com in autumn 2023.

We are the second largest encrypted email service in the world, and until early March we were ranking very well for search terms like “encrypted email” and “secure hotels and motels email list email” – which makes sense as these search terms describe the core of our products. Our rankings only dropped slightly after rebranding to a new website in the fall of 2023, as we managed the rebrand with experienced SEO experts, making sure to redirect all pages of the website one by one so that search crawlers could easily understand and index our new website.



All went well, and we steadily gained traffic through search results as our user base and product suite grew and we launched quantum-safe encryption for email . Today, Tuta Mail has over ten million users and also offers services like Tuta Calendar , Tuta Contacts and soon Tuta Drive, all securely encrypted by default.

However, in early March 2024 Google suddenly stopped showing our website for thousands of keywords, limiting search traffic to our site largely to so-called “branded traffic” only. This means that people no longer found our encrypted email provider when searching for “encrypted email” or “secure email”, but only when they explicitly searched.