Thanks for understanding how important this is, Oliver.
Our company's Chrome extension has recently dropped in the rankings from #2 to #29 for our main search term, and we've seen our Chrome Web Store impressions drop precipitously after years of steadily climbing. We're now being outranked by many low quality extensions, and even other high-quality competitors of ours are ranking poorly — so it's not just us.
Our browser extension is our company's core product, so this has negatively impacted us so severely that it's put our company's future in question. I suspect we're not alone in facing this existential threat.
I understand there may have been a change to help newer extensions rank higher in order to provide a more fair playing field for new entrants, but I'd argue that it's quite likely that the traffic split evenly isn't likely enough to sustain any company in the long term, and thus the Chrome Web Store will eventually be left devoid of any extensions delivered by professional developers like us. That's a sad potential future for our startup of course, but I'd argue that it would be a major loss for Chrome users and Google too.
Even for the new entrants, if you can't count on your extension continuing to rise in the ranking as you improve it and gain user adoption/love, then what's the path to success? Seemingly arbitrary rankings, or even rankings that change week-to-week, break the predictable success ladder that's been working for extensions for years. We launched our startup in 2019, nearly a decade after the launch of the CWS. Our main competitor had 200k installs at the time, and we had zero. The point is, despite the fact that the marketplace was fully mature, we were able to climb in the rankings over the years. I'd like to think that we earned our #2 spot, and it was pretty clear that we were on track to eventually rank #1. But now we're not even on the first two pages of results. I'm sure you can imagine how our team's hearts dropped when we realized this had occurred after so many years of hard-won progress.
I sincerely hope Google makes some changes soon, and the extensions that have earned their large user bases over the years will be returned to ranking higher for their respective search terms. Otherwise we'll likely have to start making some hard decisions.