Soon, he said, Google results would be even worse, dominated entirely by AI-generated crap designed to please the algorithms, produced and published at volumes far beyond anything humans could create, far beyond anything we’d ever seen before.
Our central takeaway from this article was simple: if you think Google Search results have deteriorated, strap in, because they’re about to get a lot worse.
This article takes us to a digital marketing convention in Florida, where experts in the dark art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) gathered to drink and discuss the future of the industry. These are the experts on backlinks, keywords and meta descriptions that help webpages rank higher in Google searches and get more clicks (and ultimately more ad dollars).
Digital marketers are going through a moment of crisis with the onset of artificial intelligence. Their efforts are being rendered more and more ineffective when compared to AI’s output. What this may lead to, as AI continues to get more efficient, is poorer quality, AI-generated content outranking higher quality, trustworthy pages at the top of our search results.
But we shouldn’t despair for our ability to find information. Google has faced these moments before. The article discusses 2003 and 2011, two previous instances where digital marketers had overrun Google’s search results with low quality pages and Google was forced to react, change their algorithms and ultimately restore Google’s basic value proposition: delivering the highest quality information as the highest search result.
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