Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Google is rolling out a few new changes to its ranking systems in search, which are designed to help surface good content in your results and hide some of the worst and most cynical stuff on the web. The company says that it is doing a better job of downranking content that exists only to summarize other content — which can sometimes be normal SEO stuff but is also increasingly a job for generative AI tools — and in combatting some of the tricks people use to trick its ranking systems.
There are always people trying to manipulate their way to the top of Google results. That’s just a fact of the web and a fact of life for Google’s search teams. Google is always making changes to its ranking algorithms, too, in an effort to improve search...