Last month, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian published an in-depth report about Brown Brothers Media, a media company that generates massive amounts of traffic — and turns a tidy profit — by purchasing legitimate online publications and then flooding them with thousands of AI-generated articles “written” by an army of nonexistent authors. It’s all an attempt to trick Google’s algorithm, boost traffic, and earn money from advertising. (Not surprisingly, BBM’s sites are plastered with ads.)
Following Futurism’s report, BBM effectively shut down and began disappearing from Google’s listings. Unfortunately, the Brown brothers are far from the only publisher employing such tactics these days. I’ve previously written about my own experience with AI slop blogs that specialize in churning out article after article of bland, AI-generated content that’s attributed to fake authors. Every single one of these blogs’ articles is intended to grab Google’s attention and generate traffic in a manner similar to “classic” SEO hacks like keyword stuffing, paid links, and doorway pages. And just like keyword stuffing, etc., the tactics employed by AI slop blogs could prove disastrous for them in the not-too-distant future.
This week, SEO expert Lily Ray published an extensive article about the various updates that Google has made to its search algorithm over the years, updates intended to improve its efficacy in part by combating shady SEO techniques. Google’s 2011 “Panda” update, for example, targeted “content farms” like eHow.com and Mahalo.com that generated lots of low-quality content (sound familiar?), and effectively crippled them by killing their search engine traffic. And if Ray’s correct about Google’s recent activity, then it’s likely that the search giant is prepping yet another update — and AI slop blogs are the intended target.
Specifically, Ray highlights some recent changes to “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content,” an article that outlines Google’s criteria for what constitutes good content. These changes seem to directly target slop purveyors like BBM and their ilk. One of Google’s criteria is the effort used to create content, which specifically calls out AI-generated content (emphasis mine):
The extent to which human work went into creating the content or the systems powering it. For example, writing original analysis, translating a poem manually, or building a custom interactive map for a game represents high effort. Conversely, automatically generating pages from feeds or using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort. Attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn’t replace the need for original effort.
Google also places a high value on content created by authors with experience and expertise, which seems like an obvious response to content attributed to non-existent AI personas (again, emphasis mine):
We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it.
However, avoid using deceptive authorship information. Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.
Reading through their documentation, it’s clear that Google’s guidelines for what constitutes good and valuable content have remained basically unchanged over the years:
- Write about what you know.
- Be thoughtful, original, substantive, honest, and trustworthy.
- Avoid deception, factual errors, inconsistencies, and exaggeration.
- And above all else, create content that benefits your human audience and don’t try to game or manipulate Google.
Google’s algorithm is certainly advanced, but “enterprising” individuals will always find gaps and loopholes that can be exploited to juice their rankings. Such efforts may prove effective for a time, but Google’s own history makes it very clear that their utility will be short-lived, and will most likely hurt you in the long run. Manipulating Google — through AI-generated content, for example — might make your site rank higher, but when Google inevitably closes whatever loophole you’re exploiting, you could end up spending months attempting to salvage your site’s ranking and reputation, if not longer.
Of course, Google isn’t addressing the problem of AI slop simply out of the goodness of their heart. They have a vested interest in ensuring that the content that appears in their rankings, and more crucially, that’s used to generate their AI summaries, is good, substantive, and trustworthy. If all that Google’s AI summaries have to rely on is bland, shallow AI-generated slop, that serves only to harm Google’s services and make them less attractive to users, who might choose to go elsewhere. (On a sidenote, you can always disable AI summaries altogether if you want more of an old school Google experience.)
If and when Google releases an update specifically targeting AI slop, it will be to their benefit as much as anyone’s. Even so, their efforts to combat hacks and grifters like Brown Brothers Media can still represent a net positive for us all. It remains incumbent upon us as individuals, however, to avoid giving our time and attention to AI slop, so that if some of it does manage to slip past Google’s efforts, we’re savvy enough to recognize it for what it is and simply ignore it.