Web search has become worse and worse over the past few years, and more recently, AI-generated spam articles have contributed to that problem. Google is now attempting to fix that, with an update rolling out to Google Search that aims to reduce “low-quality” results.
The widespread ability of generative AI tools has allowed sites to pump out hundreds or thousands of articles per day, flooding web search results for popular topics. It’s now pretty common to run into articles that were written (at least partially) by AI in search results, many of which havefactual errorsand minimal oversight by a human writer. Google haspreviously saidthat it allows AI-generated content in search results, but all articles are held to the same quality standards, and spam content would be rejected. Google Search is still littered with AI-generated spam, though.
Google Search’s algorithms have now been updated to reduce low-quality and unoriginal results. The company said in a blog post, “Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear. To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.”
It remains to be seen in these changes will have enough of an effect. Spam websites might simply cut down their output to prevent detection, or they could try other workarounds. This also doesn’t directly address AI-generated content with factual errors or just generally unhelpful information—that’s harder to automatically detect, and Google doesn’t seem to take manual action often enough. The company’s own testing reports a 40% reduction in low-quality content.
Google is also attempting to take action on “site reputation abuse,” where sites publish third-party content that is vastly different from their typical content, so the third party can benefit from that site’s existing reputation and rankings in web search. Google said, “For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.” The company also now considers expired and repurposed domains posting low-quality content as spam.
The improved spam detection is rolling out as part of Google’s March 2024 core update for Search. The change to site reputation abuse will kick in on July 31, 2025.
