Google says it will begin cracking down on AI-generated content created solely for the purpose of gaming its systems and ranking in Google Search, a change that could have a ripple effect on the quality of what we see online .
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The company made the announcement in a blog entry on Tuesday. According to Google, this change involves algorithmic improvements to its core ranking systems and is more complex than regular updates. The changes will affect three types of content, or abuse as Google calls it, the most prominent being automated content. This includes content created by generative AI.
“This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if web pages are not useful, have a poor user experience, or if we feel they are built for search engines rather than for people,” Elizabeth Tucker, director of product management at Google. , he said in the announcement. “We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content in Search and send more traffic to useful, high-quality sites.”
While the blog itself didn’t mention generative AI by name, a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email that the updates directly target “low-quality AI-generated content that is designed to attract clicks, but that doesn’t add much original value.”
Tucker said Google expects the new changes to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40 percent.
AI-generated content optimized for SEO, which stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” a set of guidelines aimed at helping a website rank higher in Google, has grown. increasingly present in Google Search results in last months, according to various reports. At least part of the increase can be attributed to the growing availability of AI tools, which can create content in a format that Google likes in seconds, and how easy it is to use them.
SEO consultant Jake Ward went viral on X/Twitter last November for boasting about how his company had used AI to stealing 3.4 million total traffic from a competitor. Ward explained that he had exported a competitor’s sitemap and created 1,800 AI articles based on their URLs. Ward’s behavior caused widespread outrage online, but unfortunately, it’s just one example of how people use AI to game Google’s search results.
“You contributed to the enshitification of the internet. But hey, you made money, so who cares, right?” user @LigerzeroTTV said in response to Ward’s publication in X.
In addition to addressing AI-generated SEO garbage, Google’s new updates will target people who post low-quality content on websites with a high reputation score. Here’s an example from Google:
“For example, a third party might post payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain site ranking benefits. This content ranking high in Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have very different expectations. with respect to the content of a particular website.”
Going forward, Google says it will consider this type of low-value content from third parties as spam.
Finally, Google said it knows some people buy expired domains from beloved websites and repurpose them with low-quality content, with the goal of using the dead site to boost search rankings for shady content. A recent example of this practice is The forka website for women that was shut down in 2018 and recently relaunched for posting AI clickbait.
“Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We’ll continue to work hard to keep low-quality content in Search to low levels and show more information created to help people” , said Tucker, the director of product management.
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