A couple of weeks ago someone pointed out on a LinkedIn post that there’s a Google Chrome browser internal Chrome URL that you can use to query the Topics API in the Privacy Sandbox.
If you cast your mind back a few years, there was a lot of buzz about the end of third-party cookies as they were a threat to user privacy. As far back as 2019 Google announced the Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to find alternative ways to serve ads without the use of third party cookies.
And here we are, some 6 years later, and we still haven’t made it out of the sandbox. Google still doesn’t have a fully-formed solution to third party cookies.
The Topics API
The Topics API is a specific part of Google’s efforts to replace third-party cookies with more privacy-friendly alternatives for interest-based advertising (IBA).
When you visit chrome://topics-internals/ in your Chrome browser, you can see information about the topics that Chrome has inferred based on your browsing history. These topics are then used to enable interest-based advertising without sharing your individual browsing history with advertisers. Instead, advertisers can target ads based on the topics associated with your browser, which are updated periodically and stored locally on your device.
We had a look ourselves and were amused by the Topics API’s classification of the 22i domains – chiefly 22i.co.uk which we’ve owned and run this website on since September 2000, and the newer 22i.digital which we own in case we need to shift domains. This was the result of querying the classifier…
22i.co.uk has been classified as a news website and 22i.digital is both a news website and about computers and electronics.
We even ran the classifiers on some competitor TLDs and some have been spot on, others just comical. We would dearly love to make it into the 104. Advertising and marketing topic but are more than happy not to be in 1. Arts and entertainment and 369. Bicycles and Accessories where some of our competition have ended up.
This is interesting because 22i.co.uk has been around for 25 years and is mostly about 536 /Internet & Telecom/Web Services/Web Hosting & Domain Registration and then 224 /Internet & Telecom/Web Services/Web Design & Development and finally a fair bit of 535 /Internet & Telecom/Web Services/Search Engine Optimization & Marketing.
22i.digital is a lot newer and less established, we haven’t even kept up the content on it. And yet, the digital domain seems to have influenced the topic classification.
Looking deeper into the subject, the domain names do seem to infer the topic. We can’t find any correlation information but the taxonomy is viewable on GitHub for the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG) individual draft space.
Now these classifiers supposedly mean nothing for SEO nor anything to do with ranking factors etc. But they do provide an insight into what Google thinks your website is supposedly about for serving ads to.
What we’re thinking is will these classifications change over time and can we influence or correct them? Only time will tell…
For the source information, visit the official Google developers page on Topics API: Testing and analysis tools.
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