Google Optimize

» see optimize.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google optimize was the free a/b testing tool that came bundled with the rest of the google marketing stack. you installed a snippet on the page and the chrome extension let you swap copy visually without touching code. for a small site without optimizely budget it was the default answer to "how do we test this". it launched in general availability september 29 2016 and ran until september 30 2023.

the predecessor was google website optimizer, a 2008-vintage product that lived for a while as "content experiments" inside google analytics. optimize was the 2016 reboot of that idea with a real visual editor. the paid tier was optimize 360, the part of the google marketing platform that competed with optimizely and vwo at the enterprise end.

this was the kind of tool that growth-marketing teams ran. i never used it on anything i shipped. edge ai work on uavs does not have a button-color experiment lane. but i remember the sunset notice landing in the marketing news cycle in early 2023, because almost every freelance front-end person i knew had to migrate clients off it that summer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the postmortem ~

google announced the sunset in january 2023 with the message that optimize "didn't have the features and services that our customers needed". the recommendation was to use one of google's a/b testing partners, all of which were paid. the migration window ran through september 30 2023. the chrome extension stopped working that day and the ga4 integration broke with it.

~ what replaced it ~

there is no direct successor. ga4 itself does not include a/b testing. optimize alternatives are now vwo and optimizely at the paid end, with smaller indie tools like growthbook and posthog filling out the rest. the small-site segment that ran optimize because it was free is the segment that mostly just stopped a/b testing. that was probably the point.

~ the killedbygoogle pattern ~

this fit the killedbygoogle.com pattern cleanly. a free tool that built habits in a community, then got retired with a quiet sunset note when the team got reorganized. the optimize team reportedly went into the ga4 effort. the affected users were thousands of marketing agencies and small businesses that did not have an enterprise contract to fall back on. the migration recommendations were a polite list of competitors. that is how google product death looks in 2023.

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