Recently, the results of a long-term survey conducted by a German research team showed that the quality of Google search is declining. The team spent more than a year conducting in-depth research on search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, and came to this conclusion by tracking the search results of 7,392 product review terms.
Preliminary results show that top-ranking pages are on average more optimized and monetized using affiliate marketing, while these pages show signs of lower text quality. Although only a small percentage of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, the majority of all search results do.
In addition, the study also found that spam websites have been playing a "cat and mouse" game with Google, rising to the top of the rankings only to be knocked down again. "The majority of product reviews that rank high in commercial search engine results pages use affiliate marketing, and a significant number are outright SEO product review garbage," the researchers said.
While Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo regularly adjust their algorithms to remove outright spam, overall this only has a "temporary positive impact." Researchers warn that with the advent of AI-generated spam, this ranking war could become more serious and truly threaten the future effectiveness of search engines.
They argue that the lines between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms are becoming increasingly blurred – a situation that is sure to worsen when AI is generated.