Google’s fight against AI content-farms is showing promise

Last month, Google Search, aka the pathway to Reddit for millions, altered its algorithms and policies in a bid to combat the fast-growing amount of AI-generated, spammy content ranking high in its results.

The tech giant says the changes, which emphasize elevating human authors with expertise by parsing through the internet footprints that accompany them (bios, work experience, etc.), will reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.

• Ian Nuttall, a prominent figure in the SEO community, has been tracking the indexing status of 49,345 websites since the changes. So far, 837 of the tracked sites – collectively accounting for ~21 million organic search visits/month – have been deindexed (removed from Search results).
• And the outcome seems to be (mostly) as intended. A recent Originality.ai study of these deindexed websites found 100% showed signs of AI-generated content, with 50% having 90-100% of their posts generated by AI.

But loopholes still remain. The Search Engine Journal recently chronicled an example of an obviously AI-generated content site consistently ranking in the top-10 of search queries after the changes, with experts saying this is likely due to Google’s policy of giving newly created websites an initial boost.

🥊 Bottom line: Spam and affiliate sites are locked in an ongoing cat-and-mouse, Whac-A-Mole-style battle with search engines. And, for now, Google just put a point in the win column.