AI Has Made Google Search So Bad People Are Moving to TikTok & Reddit

Google search results are overrun with low-quality AI content, so people are turning to humans for answers

AI Image generated with DALL.E by the author

The inner workings of the Google search algorithm are a well-kept secret.

People have been making a lot of money trying to figure out how it works.

SEO optimization, the art of making Google rank your content high, is a really well-paid skill.

As long as humans were trying to outsmart humans, Google managed to stay on top of the worst spam content.

But along came AI and turned search engine ranking into a hare and tortoise race.

A race that Google is losing.

People can’t find what they’re looking for, so they turn to platforms like TikTok and Reddit to get answers from humans directly.

To remain relevant, Google has to maintain a balance between you finding what you’re looking for and them making money.

You have to trust that the results you get are useful. Or that you’ll at least find what you’re looking for.

But now, the algorithm is overwhelmed with AI-powered SEO Spam that is stopping people from finding what they’re looking for.

Content written by robots for robots is clogging up our search results

AI-powered content mills are generating content at a speed that no human writer can match.

And that spammy, low-quality content is optimized for Google SEO by AI in a way that outranks any human-written content.

If you click on the top search results these days, you’ll find low-quality content that is often riddled with errors and false information. But the Google algorithm can’t recognize that.

As a result, content written by robots for robots is clogging up our search results.

We’ve been relying on Google to deliver information to our fingertips for 25 years. And it did an amazing job for a long time.

There’s a reason that Google dominates over 91% of the entire global search market.

But it’s no secret that Google search results are getting worse and worse. The battle between affiliate spam sites and the developers of the Google algorithm has been raging for years.

And with AI in the mix, it doesn’t look like Google is managing to keep pace with developments.

In December 2023, the Search Engine Journal reported on how a massive spam attack completely overwhelmed Google’s algorithm.

Google’s search results have been hit by a spam attack for the past few days in what can only be described as completely out of control.

The spammers exploited key elements of Google’s algorithm to suppress legitimate results.

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Of course, Google is trying to solve the problem. But it’s a cat-and-mouse game that they lose as often as they win.

At the moment, you can’t trust Google to provide reliable answers. Especially if you’re looking for information about products you want to buy.

Affiliate link spam is consistently ranked higher than real information, and there is so much of it. It’s nearly impossible to find the needle in the haystack.

People have been vocal about this for some time now.

Like this user on Reddit:

I’ve noticed a lot lately that google is just straight up not returning relevant results often, I have no ads, so it’s not just feeding me those.

I used to google things, and it would be perfect, then I ended up having to refine my searches a lot with things such as “” to search for exact words, and now, even that doesn’t seem to work.

or this one:

I feel like every time I try to Google I’ll just get search results that aren’t related to what I typed at all… like I’ll type in Toothpaste for cats and the first results will be toothpaste for dogs. I’ll Google a question and try to use as many specific words as possible since apparently it’s a niche subject and I’ll still get the same results that don’t have the stuff I’m looking for.

The comments on these posts are full of users describing the same issues.

A German research team wanted to find out whether there is any truth to our collective impression that results are becoming worse.

They spent an entire year analyzing the effects of SEO spam on search engines.

And unsurprisingly, they saw that all have the same issues:

We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries. Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content — more than is representative for the entire web…

…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

In short, they found that search engines will deliver low-quality text with lots of affiliate links.

They’ll not prioritize content that is well-written and comes from trustworthy sources.

But this isn’t the worst of it.

It feels like the whole internet is going down the drain.

Yes, after ChatGPT burst on the scene, we all had to come to terms with the reality that AI bots scrape the internet for content to train their models.

We have to live with the indiscriminate copying of our writing, our art, our pictures, and everything we produce. Used to then churn out low-quality versions of human-like writing that add no useful information for the reader.

But SEO-optimized, AI-powered websites are taking this to a new level.

Some “bloggers” have created sites that publish hundreds of AI articles per day. Regurgitating information while adding nothing of value.

Garbage that is entirely customized to appease the robot gods that control the internet now.

Their only mission is to get on the good side of the Google algorithm that favors “fresh” content.

They’re burying all human-written content under an avalanche of AI garbage. Garbage that is entirely customized to appease the robot gods that control the internet now.

As 404media reports:

The broader SEO industry, meanwhile, is now filled with companies that are using or intend to use generative AI to further optimize types of content that already feel formulaic even when written by humans. Bing and Google are now themselves rolling out AI-generated search results. The possible end result of all of this is that robots will continue writing a huge number of articles to please other robots,

Even Google News can’t be counted on to deliver news from credible websites anymore.

On bad days they rank low-quality AI sites before real human-written quality journalism.

It turns out some sites aren’t bothering with creating new AI content.

In their recent podcast episode “Why Google is Shit Now,” 404media.co reported on how AI sites rip off content from human writers.

They copy articles published on reputable sites and republish them on AI-powered content mills within seconds after they’re first published.

And they get ranked high on Google News with this stolen content.

It seems there’s no way to stop them.

Putting a “no AI flag” on your site only works for OpenAI, not for other bots.

It’s not that Google isn’t aware that they’re losing confidence among users. And I honestly believe they’re trying to fix this.

But AI tools are so much faster than humans.

Bots have no problem overwhelming the search engines and all attempts to rectify the situation.

As the general internet is flooded with more and more garbage articles and spam, people are turning back to humans to answer their questions.

They go to TikTok and Reddit to search for the answers that can no longer be found on Google.

There, they can at least ask real people for their opinions or see them reviewing products.

Is this solution without risks? Of course not.

Companies pay TikTok influencers a lot of money to promote inferior products in their videos. We’ve all been to a bad restaurant because it was overhyped on TikTok.

But it all comes down to what you’re willing to trust.

And I’d rather trust the wrong human than the wrong bot.

Reddit isn’t immune to users setting up bot accounts and spamming the subreddits with AI comments. But there are human moderators there that can block and delete spam.

Is human intervention bulletproof? Absolutely not. I’m pretty sure AI spammers will find a way to overwhelm these channels as well.

And it might be a while until we find a solution to this problem.

If there’s anything positive in this whole debacle, it’s the fact that people are going back to asking people for their opinions.

With the loss of the integrity of information on the internet, we might just all have to start asking our friends and families for advice again.

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