Google's Search Results Are Being Poisoned by AI Spam
Source: Kottke
The article identifies "sloptimization"—the deliberate injection of low-quality, AI-generated content designed to game search rankings—as the logical endpoint of Google's quarter-century accommodation of SEO gaming. Google has monetized its search monopoly by allowing content farms and now AI mills to flourish in results because they capture ad inventory, creating a race-to-the-bottom where genuine expertise gets buried beneath optimized garbage. The speed and scale of AI-generated spam has compressed the timeline: the web's primary discovery mechanism is becoming unusable for finding actual information rather than marketing funnel content.