







'Not all AI content is spam, but I think right now all spam is AI content'
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests
"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests
An AI detection company found that amount of AI content that users actually see in their day-to-day browsing is shockingly high.

Bad news for Google — new survey shows 55% of people are now using AI instead of search engines
More users are turning to AI search for personalized responses

Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated
Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web.

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
"The majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam."

AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.

Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack
Google is apparently struggling to contain a spam attack that's been ongoing for days

Inside the Economy of AI Spammers Getting Rich By Exploiting Disasters and Misery
How AI spammers monetized the LA fires and other natural disasters.

Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles
404 Media reviewed multiple examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News. Google said it doesn't focus on how an article was produced—by an AI or human—opening the way for more AI-generated articles.

Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers
In this post, we'll share more about how AI-generated content fits into our long-standing approach to show helpful content to people on Search.

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines
Many users of web search engines have been complaining in recent years about the supposedly decreasing quality of search results. This is often attributed to an increasing amount of search-engine-optimized but low-quality content. Evidence for this has always been anecdotal, yet it’s not unreasonable to think that popular online marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing incentivize the mass production of such content to maximize clicks. Since neither this complaint nor affiliate marketing as such have received much attention from the IR community, we hereby lay the groundwork by conducting an in-depth exploratory study of how affiliate content affects today’s search engines. 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 according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. Of all affiliate networks, Amazon Associates is by far the most popular. 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. 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. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention. (Code and data: https://github.com/webis-de/ECIR-24).

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines
Many users of web search engines have been complaining in recent years about the supposedly decreasing quality of search results. This is often attributed to an increasing amount of search-engine-optimized but low-quality content. Evidence for this has always been anecdotal, yet it’s not unreasonable to think that popular online marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing incentivize the mass production of such content to maximize clicks. Since neither this complaint nor affiliate marketing as such have received much attention from the IR community, we hereby lay the groundwork by conducting an in-depth exploratory study of how affiliate content affects today’s search engines. 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 according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. Of all affiliate networks, Amazon Associates is by far the most popular. 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. 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. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention. (Code and data: https://github.com/webis-de/ECIR-24).

AI-driven Bot Attacks Surged 12.5x According to Thales Bad Bot Report
Bots now dominate the internet, accounting for over half of all traffic, with 40% classified as malicious.AI is erasing the line between legitimate and maliciou

AI-powered hate content is on the rise, experts say | CBC News
Experts say that artificial intelligence technology is allowing for a rapid increase in the amount of hateful content and misinformation online.

Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has…
