“It’s a mistake to make money from it.”
AI theft
A website has fallen victim to a pernicious new online scheme its authors shamelessly boast is an “SEO attack”, the latest example of how generative AI is being used to accelerate the deterioration of search engines that form the backbone of the Internet.
The website in question is Exceljet, a hub for everything you need to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns began to notice a drop in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to mimic almost every article on their website with inferior and often error-filled copy designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet’s traffic.
“It’s one thing to be beaten by an article that’s arguably better than the article you wrote, but it’s another thing to be beaten by an article written by a machine that no human has ever reviewed,” Bruns. he told Business Insider. “It’s a mistake to make money from it.”
SEOcean’s Eleven
Search engine optimization, or SEO, describes the tricks and tactics used to help websites rank higher in search results, which leads to more clicks. It serves a practical purpose, but the ruthless play of search engines, and especially Google, has long affected the broader functionality of the Internet, ranking fake results over useful ones.
Generative AI has further compounded the problem. By using great language models like ChatGPT, content strategists can quickly produce a high volume of low-quality articles filled with important SEO keywords, the only part that matters if your bottom line is clicks .
That’s exactly what one such content strategist, Jake Ward, used to hijack Exceljet’s readers.
“We did an SEO heist that stole 3.6 million total traffic from a competitor,” Ward boast in an X thread recounting the feat last month. “In October alone we had 489,509 traffic.”
As he explains it, Ward fed the URLs of the 1,800 Exceljet pages into an “SEO-optimized” AI article writer called Byword. The bot automatically spit out articles based on Exceljet’s successful headlines, and Ward published these ersatz articles en masse, quickly diverting clicks to his own website and away from Exceljet. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong.
“It’s unusual for something acceptable, if done once, to suddenly become unethical when replicated at scale,” Ward. wrote to Xas detected by BI.
Checked fact
The “attack” has damaged Bruns’ website. But it can also hurt readers who need real information. According to his analysis, Bruns found that some of Ward’s AI-generated articles contained glaring factual errors, in one case explaining an Excel function that did not exist.
“I started looking at the quality of the articles and realized that we’re losing traffic to things that don’t even make sense,” he told BI.
Part of the blame lies with Google, he argues, for not doing enough to weed out SEO scammers.
“This is a big problem for Google,” Bruns added. “If people keep finding crappy articles at the top of the search results, they’ll end up questioning whether Google is doing a good job, but the fact that the articles are near or can be at the top of the result fa. they seem to be legit.”
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