The San Francisco-based vacation rental company, which is preparing to go public next month, submitted its initial IPO filing on Monday including a list of 'risk factors' the business is facing. Among them is the increasing competition from search engines including Google, which has been using its own services to promote new travel sites Google Travel and Google Vacation Rental Ads. 'We believe that our SEO results have been adversely affected by the launch of Google Travel and Google Vacation Rental Ads, which reduce the prominence of our platform in organic search results for travel-related terms and placement on Google,' Airbnb said in their prospectus. The company said its advertising and marketing strategies rely on unpaid channels such as search engine optimization (SEO) which can allow its listings to appear more prominently on search results. Changes to search engine algorithms could negatively affect Airbnb's search-engine rankings and traffic to its platform, the company said.

Source: Daily Mail November 17, 2020 17:16 UTC