Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy designed in part to prevent artificial intelligence clickbait from appearing in its search results.
“It sounds like this is going to be one of the biggest updates in Google’s history,” said Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at marketing agency Amsive. “It can change everything.”
Google claimed in a blog post that the change would reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40%. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “massive content abuse,” in which bad actors flood the internet with articles and blog posts designed to game search engines.
“A good example is the abuse of obituary spam, which has been around for some time,” said Pandu Nayak, vice president of search at Google. Obituary spam is a particularly serious type of digital piracy, in which people try to make money by scraping and republishing death notices, sometimes on social platforms such as YouTube. Recently, obituary spammers have started to use artificial intelligence tools to increase their output, making the problem worse. Google’s new policy, if implemented effectively, should make it harder for this kind of spam to show up in online searches.
This more aggressive approach to fighting search spam specifically targets “squatting,” the practice in which scavengers buy high-profile websites to profit from their reputation, often generated with artificial intelligence designed to manipulate search engine rankings. The article replaces the original news. This behavior predates the AI boom, but with the rise of text generation tools like ChatGPT, it’s become increasingly easier to churn out countless articles to game Google rankings.
The surge in cybersquatting is just one of the problems that has damaged Google’s search reputation in recent years. “People can set up these websites very easily,” says SEO expert Gareth Boyd, who runs the digital marketing firm Forte Analytica. “That’s a big problem.” (Boyd admitted that he even created similar sites in the past, though he said he no longer does so.)
In February, Wired reported on multiple artificial intelligence clickbait networks using cybersquatting as a tactic, including The Hairpin, an independent women’s website that will no longer exist, and the shuttered Hong Kong pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily 》A website with artificial intelligence embedded into it. -The nonsense generated. Another project transformed the website of a small-town Iowa newspaper into a bizarre repository for AI-powered blog posts about retail stocks. Under Google’s new policy, such behavior is now explicitly classified by the company as spam.
In addition to cybersquatting, Google’s new policy will also focus on eliminating “reputation abuse,” in which trusted websites allow third-party sources to publish spam sponsored content or other digital garbage. (Google’s blog post cites “payday loan reviews on trusted education sites” as an example.) While other parts of the spam policy will begin immediately, Google will provide 60 days’ notice before cracking down on reputation abuse. , in order to provide help to the website it’s time to queue up.
Nayak said the company has been working on this specific update since late last year. More broadly, since 2022, the company has been working on ways to address low-quality content in search, including AI-generated spam. “We are aware of the problem,” Nayak said. “Making these changes effectively takes time.”
Some SEO experts are cautiously optimistic that the changes could restore Google’s search efficiency. “Hopefully things can go back to the way they were before,” Ray said. “But we’ll have to see what happens.”