Google will sunset Optimize, its A/B testing tool, later this year

Google will sunset Optimize and Optimize 360 on September 30, 2023. “Your experiments and personalizations can continue to run until that date. Any experiments and personalizations still active on that date will end.” Google wrote on its support page.

Launched over 5 years ago, Google Optimize is an analytics and testing tool that allows businesses to run experiments and optimize their websites in order to increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction. In addition to analytics capabilities, the tool allows you to customize web pages to tailor the site experience to the visitor, and to run A/B tests.

So, why is Google discontinuing this popular tool? According to the tech giant, “Optimize, though a longstanding product, does not have many of the features and services that our customers request and need for experimentation testing. We therefore have decided to invest in solutions that will be more effective for our customers.” It means Google wants to build more testing functionalities into Google Analytics 4, and gradually replace its Optimize tools with Google Analytics.

As you can guess, marketers aren't too happy, but this might drive some competing software to improve, and we might even see some paid tools to offer free plans in the future to take this huge market Optimize will leave behind.

Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will cease to function as of September 30 this year. Customers can still use the tool for their existing personalization and testing projects until this date. After that, the service will no longer function, making it the latest Killed by Google product.