Report: Google is Now Using AI to Mess With Headlines

Google is apparently not done messing with publishers traffic after reports suggest that AI is being used to mess with headlines.

Things have been quietly getting worse and worse with Google over the years when it comes to search results. In 2024, things got concerning when Google rolled out AI Overview. Overview, as many know, is an AI generated summary that appears at the top of results, replacing the best content the web crawler could find and pushing those results further down the page. While denied be Google, the goal is quite clear: stop people from clicking away from Google while Google utilizes the content it crawls to keep users on Google’s search results. Google didn’t even really bother hiding this as this was the whole intention of this “feature”.

As a result, traffic to publishers began to plummet. Even if you managed to score a top spot in the AI Overview links, you are getting nowhere near the traffic you would with a normal top search result. This has sparked anti-trust complaints against Google itself as people find their overall traffic plummeting. This, as a result, has made it substantially more difficult to stay afloat as an independent website.

For as bad as that was (and that, itself, was really bad), things got even worse. Last year, Google pushed “AI Mode“, a feature that strips out search results completely and leaving only whatever the heck the AI hallucinates and gets wrong. At first, only a “select few” would partake in a trial run. Unfortunately, as time progressed, the push for a so-called “trial run” got gradually more aggressive. Turning down the “trial” would only result in Google pushing harder for you to switch to AI mode. This with prompts that, based on our observations, occur about once a month with multiple requests to turn down before the nagware finally goes away for a while.

The traffic for websites, as a result, continued to plummet. Research has long concluded that Google is aiming for what has been described as a “zero click internet” where content creators get to see their hard work simply fall into the void, never to be seen again. This as the AI scraper shows possibly their hard work chopped to pieces and mashed together in some sort of AI hallucinated monstrosity that is probably wrong to users afterwards.

The only saving grace here is that you can constantly turn down the never ending prompts to use AI mode, scroll past the AI Overview results, and get something resembling the original web results. At least we got that going for us, right? Well, even if you jump through those hurdles, it’s entirely possible that you won’t escape the heavy handed AI slop Google is pushing. A new report is indicating that Google is using AI to alter the headlines of search results on top of it all. From the Verge:

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

Like I wrote in January, when Google decided it wouldn’t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover from The Verge and our competitors, this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.

The report goes on to note that this appears to be very limited to a handful of links. I did a quick look through my own headlines on Google search and didn’t see anything that was altered, but obviously, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen later with a result I didn’t find.

Still, that is a worrying move by Google. There’s no rhyme or reason for Google to just arbitrarily rewrite headlines, let alone using some crappy AI to do it. Either way, there is reason to worry that traffic coming from Google is only going to go from bad to worse.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.