Google’s efforts to combat AI-generated spam articles, or “AI slop,” have fallen short according to a recent Wired investigation. Despite policy changes aimed at reducing low-quality content, AI-tweaked plagiarized news stories are still ranking above genuine articles in search results. The investigation found that spammy websites were republishing plagiarized content from Wired and other news outlets, often with AI-generated artwork. These unauthorized copies appeared in multiple languages and outranked the original articles. Google’s March campaign against AI spam claimed to reduce low-quality content by 45%, but the problem persists. The ease of using AI to scrape and modify content has created a cat-and-mouse game between spammers and search engines. This issue is particularly concerning given Google’s recent return to paginated search results, which could further impact legitimate businesses relying on search traffic.
AI-Generated Spam Outranking Real News on Google
AI-generated spam articles are outranking genuine news in Google search results, despite efforts to combat low-quality content.
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