The surge of AI content in Google search results is significant. It increased from a mere 2.3 percent before GPT-2 in January 2019 to a staggering 10.2 percent by March 2024. This tripled over five years despite Google’s firm stance against AI spam, according to a new study by Originality.AI.
Since August 2022, Google has been battling AI content with its “helpful content” policy updates and its most recent March 2024 update targeting “AI Spam.” With both updates, Google’s enforcement actions resulted in plummeting search rankings and the complete deindexation of websites from search Google results.
According to the research, AI-generated content is still prevalent in Google’s top search results. Their study analyzed 500 popular keywords’ top 20 search results from 2019 to the present, revealing a consistent increase in AI content.
This indicates that AI content is becoming more present in Google search results despite Google’s increasing efforts to keep it at bay. It is important for Google to mitigate AI content from taking over search results, as this will reduce them to a mere echo chamber of popular LLM outputs.
The bottom line is that Google is facing an existential threat and is losing the AI war. We should expect harsher and more frequent updates from the tech giant in the coming months.
Despite Google’s attempts to reduce AI-driven content, the bottom line is that Google is facing an existential threat and is losing the AI war. AI content is growing faster than the search giant can control, and dominating search engine results. “If Google continues to lose ground against AI spam, we could see streaming services become dominated also due to their technological dependencies,” said Jon Gillham, AI Expert and founder of Originality.AI.
