Google search increasingly looks like it just isn’t working the way it used to.
The search engine that has become a 21st century staple in virtually everyone’s lives, used billions of times a day, is struggling with the unintended consequences of a recent update. Basically, it’s all spammed up. Welcome to web search’s junk mail era.
“It’s the worst quality results on Google I’ve seen in my 14-year career,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at digital marketing agency Amsive Digital.
Pop-up windows, ads for spurious products, and links that are sure to download some impossible-to-remove malware are common on the internet. But one doesn’t usually see them interspersed in between websites on Google. With billions of searches a day to go alongside the countless websites on the internet Google can only catch so many of these scammers before they pop up again like a game of digital whack-a-mole.
“Right now, it feels like the scammers are winning,” Ray tells Fortune.
In essence what happened, according to Ray, was Google released an update to its algorithm that pushed user generated content further up the rankings of its search results. The idea was that when users asked a question, they’d get to see answers from other real people who might have the answer, democratizing the web further and moving gatekeeper authority away from, say, news sites such as Fortune. Google called this the hidden gems update, implemented in a series of changes from May to November 2023, because it was ostensibly supposed to find the best answers from across the internet regardless of who had posted them. So if a user searched “what’s the best used muffler?” or “how to know if my homemade beer has gone bad?” they’d find answers from other people who had car trouble or were more experienced homebrewers.
Instead what ended up happening is unscrupulous sites realized they could take advantage of the new policy by putting spam links in places Google’s new algorithm prioritized, according to Ray.
“Google Docs, Google Maps, Linkedin, Reddit, anywhere you can imagine that there is a forum, spammers are taking advantage of it,” Ray says.
A recent study from researchers in Germany that examined the quality of product review websites, previously reported on by 404 Media, is in line with Ray’s claims. The higher-ranked pages on the searches they conducted tended to have lower-quality texts and more affiliate links meant to monetize those sites, according to the research. Although, the quality of Google’s search did outperform that of its competitors Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company also had the most effective mitigation tactics compared to other search engines, although the spammers would also eventually find ways around those.
As Ray told Gizmodo about the state of web search: “I’ve never seen Google in such disarray.”
‘SEO parasites’ leech off legitimate webpages
The reason some bad actors found it worthwhile to spam the new search update was because of something called affiliate links. They’re a common online practice whereby a website might earn a commission if a product gets bought after clicking a link featured on one of its pages. If a website with a lot of affiliate links can make it to the top of the pile on Google Search, that can be quite lucrative for whoever owns that website. And scammers try to take advantage of the rules to try and peddle worthless products via links on useless websites.
Just getting into the prime positions on Google is a business unto itself known as search engine optimization, or SEO. Last year, SEO was a $76 billion business, according to market research company IBISWorld. It’s another very common practice for virtually any business that has an online presence (including every story this reporter publishes on Fortune.com). SEO has become a critical part of most online marketing and is considered a speciality in the advertising world. When done well, it ensures that the most relevant information surfaces to the most visible spots on Google.
For example, people living in an area where a hurricane is expected to make landfall would need trusted sources of weather alerts, like the National Weather Service or a local news outlet, at the top of their Google searches. The irksome side effect is that many search results now look the same. A simple search for something like “best bed sheets” turns up dozens of the same article with titles like “The 8 Best Sheets of 2024,” or “The 22 Very Best Bed Sheets,” or the more colorful “These Are Our Favorite Sheets to Catch Some Z’s.”
Critics of SEO would argue it’s turned online search into a homogenous experience where all the results reiterate the same information. Filterworld, a new book by New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka, argues that by now, roughly 30 years into a world changed by the internet, the power of the algorithm has gone beyond culture to curate countless everyday experiences into “feeds,” for example the oddly similar coffee-shop aesthetic around the world. On the other hand, supporters would say it’s a way to reward the best websites, in particular if they’re small businesses who might not be able to afford huge advertising budgets for the paid spots at the top of Google’s search results.
“The constant struggle of billion-dollar search engine companies with targeted SEO affiliate spam should serve as an example that web search is a dynamic game with many players, some with bad intentions,” the study’s authors write.
A spokesperson for Google said the study is flawed in that it only looked at certain search terms. “This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day,” they told Fortune in an email.
Another problem that caused the quality of Google’s search results to decline, according to Ray, is what she calls “SEO parasites” who are “leeching off of big publishers.” This is when a trusted website leases out space on their site, and crucially their domain name, to third parties for sponsored content. These third parties capitalize on the traffic and respectability of the parent site to stuff their sponsored post with affiliate links. It’s technically allowed but just doesn’t make for a great experience.
“People are exploiting loopholes on Google,” Ray says.
The study from the German researchers also found that the prevalence of affiliate links could be correlated to lower-quality websites. “We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns,” the study says. “However, we also notice that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI.”
From the earliest days of AI, watchdogs warned it could be used to make scamming easier. AI-generated voice recordings could impersonate people or their loved ones as part of a ruse to gain access to their banking information or medical records. While in the case of online search, AI lets fraudsters make the sort of junk content that’s cluttering Google’s search results at an unprecedented scale.
A Google spokesperson pointed Fortune to a post on X from Ray highlighting Google’s handling of a complaint about shady content hosted on a Harvard University URL, stating the company was working to “take steps to better deal with third party content of this nature.” Google’s account also specified that “was likely a case that the site is unaware this content has been placed on it rather than a purposeful attempt to host the content.”
Google also acknowledged in its statement to Fortune that it has “launched specific improvements to address these issues [highlighted in the study].” Google noted that the study itself points out that Google Search has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. “More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.”
Ray agrees that Google is aware of the problem and is working to address it, likely through a mix of updates to its user policy and to its algorithm. “Google always generally gets things right,” she says. “It just takes them time.”
