Google Optimize, beloved A/B testing tool of the small and the scrappy, died on September 30, 2023, of strategic misalignment. It was eleven years old.
Optimize is survived by hundreds of thousands of orphaned experiments, an unknown number of testing programs that quietly stopped existing, and a market of replacements priced like a second engineering hire.
It was not perfect. Its statistics were a black box. It flickered. It capped you at five experiments and shrugged. But it was there, it was free, and an entire generation of marketers learned to test because it existed. Then its parent company — market cap in the trillions — looked at the tool that taught the internet to experiment and saw a line item.
The stated cause of death was that it “did not have many of the features and services that customers request.” The features were requested. The customers were there. What wasn’t there was a reason for a trillion-dollar advertising company to care.
No migration path was provided at first. The endorsed alternatives began around $10,000 a year.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you never again build your team’s institutional memory on a product that can be deleted by someone who has never heard of you.