It will be fascinating to watch what happens with Google Search this coming year. It’s the behemoth. It alone is the life blood of countless small businesses. And yet “Google Zero” threatens — radical changes to Google search results where good, previously-reliable traffic absolutely plummets to essentially nothing. Review site HouseFresh’s story is an example.
AI slop generation is flooding the web, and people are feeling like that’s what Google wants in the sense that that’s what seems to work for SEO.
“If I made a blog post that was just what you would want as a person — ‘Here are 25 gift items under $25,’ [added] a picture of each one, a price, and a link — Google would not like it. Google would hate that list,” she says. “So here we are with all this text that is written only for a search engine.”
A storefront for robots
It’s just anecdotal and representative only of my own bubble, but everyone I know considers Google Search on a downhill slide of quality. Overblown? Maybe. Conspiracy to push people toward AI usage? Probably not, but who knows. Me, I’d prefer Google to triple down on helping people find other websites, not keep them on their own. And if they absolutely must plow ahead on AI work, find a way to do that while punishing slop, not rewarding it.