The last few years have been tumultuous ones for search engine providers, with Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and the rest having to adapt to the impact to AI, machine learning, and large language models.
My colleague Richard MacManus has already written about the future of websites in the AI era and how search engines are turning into generative AI chatbots. Factor in declining referrals and shrinking social media traffic to websites, and the list of potential headaches for SEO practitioners seems to be growing.
That’s not all: The advent of AI has made it remarkably easy to produce content of all varieties, from the written word to still images and video. With a veritable flood of AI-generated content being pumped onto the internet at an ever-increasing rate, how can search providers help readers differentiate between the gray sludge of AI-produced drivel and the valuable nuggets of content on the Internet, ideally produced — or at least curated — by real humans? As someone who has spent most of his adult life creating, editing, and strategizing about the content of the human-generated variety, I admittedly have a vested interest in the topic.
The AI Content Spam Conundrum
While it’s undeniable that AI can be a valuable aid for content producers — helping generate ideas, transcribing content from one format to another, quickly generating copy that can be edited and refined later, among many other useful examples — the use of AI to generate low-quality content is already having an impact, particularly when used in ethically dubious ways. Here are a few recent examples:
Former tech journalist (and current senior developer advocate at Github) Christina Warren learned that the current owners of TUAW bought the domain and then “…populated it with AI-generated slop, and then reused my name from a job I had when I was 21 years old to try to pull some SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed its algo.”
Images, artwork, and video content aren’t immune from the AI-generated slop onslaught.
Then there’s the story of an SEO agency that bragged about pulling off an “…SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor,” which involved exporting the competitor’s sitemap, turning “…their list of URLs into article titles…” and then creating “…1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI.”
Alex Hern and Dan Milmo at The Guardian have chronicled efforts by some in the tech community to designate this new category of AI-generated content as Slop rather than Spam, while Reece Rogers at Wired has discussed how AI spam was ranking above original reporting in news results.
Images, artwork, and video content aren’t immune from the AI-generated slop onslaught, as Shannon Bond at NPR reported on AI-generated images that are starting to flood social media feeds. Bond wrote that “…beyond finding AI spam on Facebook annoying, many people NPR spoke with say they’re worried about the larger stakes of artificial images showing up everywhere.” Note the worry expressed here about AI-generated content. I’ll expand a bit on that concern and what it might mean for all of us in a bit.
The Impact AI Is Having on Search and Content
To get some additional perspective on how AI is impacting search, SEO, and content development, I reached out to Duane Forrester, the senior vice president in charge of search at INDEXR.ai — and the former head of the Bing Webmaster Tools program — to get his take on the positives and negatives that AI brings to the table for search, SEO, and content efforts.
“It’s like having access to the internet’s library of technical and content creation advice within one system.”
– Duane Forrester, INDEXR.ai
Forrester lauded the increased efficiency that AI tools can provide, from faster workflows to increased throughput. “[I’m] thinking of content here, especially when approached from the idea generation side, but also from the pure writing side… [AI also provides] increased brand-voice alignment, [as it’s] easier to tell a system to write a certain way and have all baseline drafts aligned in voice… [and also] provides easier editing for basic elements like grammar and syntax when creating content.”
Another bonus is the power that AI provides for optimization work. “An AI-based system can… look at your pages, your code, your content, and offer recommendations based on the universe of known best practices,” Forrester said. “It’s like having access to the internet’s library of technical and content creation advice within one system.”
On the negative side, Forrester notes that some companies think they can replace writers, but notes that “…those who have often suffer.” In addition to the impact on content producers, Forrester notes that the “…flood of low-quality content not only affects search results, but as consumers engage with those poorer results, it trains both the consumer and search platforms to feed more of that low-quality content into the results, since people are engaging with it.”
Taking the impact of low-quality content a step further, the ease of generating AI-produced content can lull companies into a false sense of security. “Businesses falsely assume [that] whatever an AI-generative system produces is high enough quality to skip reviewing and just publish,” said Forrester. “The lack of oversight can pose a serious problem if you publish low-quality, inaccurate or dangerous content.”
Fixing the Problem: Detecting AI Content
So what are Google, Bing, and other search engines doing about the problem of easily-generated AI chaff clogging up our search results? Both Google and Bing have released updates or made improvements to their algorithms to address problems, and will undoubtedly continue to improve how their search engines handle AI-generated content.
Search engines “remain diligent and aware of bad actors trying to link spam against domains and they thwart those instances.”
– Forrester
“From personal experience inside Bing I know that employees show up every single day with the sole focus of their work being to spot and stop bad actors,” said Forrester. “Google has similar teams. All focused on quality results and safety. With 100% confidence, I can say that both of these major engines take this seriously and work hard at solving this problem. Now, could they do more? Absolutely. There are, I’m sure, myriad ways for spammers to still exploit things that are known and should be dealt with. Yet, these issues remain, floating, still not solved, still allowing problems to persist. The engines will tell you ‘negative SEO’ isn’t a thing. It doesn’t happen. They remain diligent and aware of bad actors trying to link spam against domains and they thwart those instances reliably.”
The AI-Generated Content Trust Gap
Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said I’d circle back on the worries consumers have about AI-generated content? While some companies use AI as a valuable tool to help existing employees become more efficient, others, sadly, have reduced headcount with the idea that AI can take up the slack. While the efficiency gains AI tools provide as support tools are undeniable, it’s becoming clear that AI-generated content also has a credibility problem.
62% are “less likely to engage with and trust content if they know it was created by an AI application.”
– Hootsuite report, 2024
In addition to the cautious consumers leery of AI-generated content I referenced earlier, a bit of human-powered research reveals that they’re not alone: According to HootSuite’s Social Media 2024 Trends Report, 62% of survey respondents indicated they were “less likely to engage with and trust content if they know it was created by an AI application.” Throw in the news about AI-generated articles by fake authors at Sports Illustrated and USA Today, and you can see why many consumers are wary of what AI means for the content they consume.
There are also continuing concerns about AI “hallucinations” — including a widely-reported instance of Google’s AI Overviews feature suggesting that people “…make pizza with a quarter cup of nontoxic glue as an ingredient to prevent cheese from sliding off the pizza after cooking.” Google has since corrected that specific issue, but it’s sensible advice to treat AI as a useful tool that still needs hands-on supervision by expert human employees, rather than a fire-and-forget panacea that narrow-minded CEOs believe can replace their search and content marketing departments wholesale.
The Future of SEO, AI, and Content Spam
Google and other search providers are clearly making a concerted effort to improve how their search algorithms find and reward quality content of the AI or human-generated variety, with Google’s recent August 2024 Broad Core update continuing Google’s drive to “…improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”
“If you know your customer inside and out, you’ll be in the best place to deliver exactly what they need, making you invaluable to the search engines.”
– Forrester
Google has repeatedly stated that it intends to reward quality content that is written for humans over search engines—regardless of whether the content is created by a human or AI—so time will tell how successful Google, Bing, and other search providers will be at separating mass-produced AI content spam from quality material written (or at least guided by) human authors.
When it comes to other advice for SEO and content practitioners, Forrester suggests that they remain focused on the needs of their customers first. “It may sound trite today, but who do you think the big search companies are focused on? That’s right… your customer. If you know your customer inside and out, you’ll be in the best place to deliver exactly what they need, making you invaluable to the search engines.”
Beyond that, Forrester recommends keeping a close eye on all the ongoing changes to search and AI tools as they’re updated and improved over time. “We’ll see more, and more frequent changes moving forward. Missing them and not reacting could cost a business, so stay tuned in and understand how the changes impact consumers, then adjust as needed.”
The post How AI-Generated Content Is Challenging SEO and Web Operators appeared first on The New Stack.
To find out how AI is impacting search, SEO, and content, we spoke to Duane Forrester from INDEXR.ai about the pros and cons of AI.