Ask HN: Has Google started cleaning their search results from AI slop?

1 points by gosen ↗ HN
Hey everyone,

I'm maintaining a couple personal pet projects and I've recently noticed in google search console that on both projects impressions and clicks went from 500-700 impressions / 10-15 clicks daily to almost zero in one day. First I thought that I broke something (e.g. added noindex by mistake or so), but everything was good and content was good, fresh and up to date.

I went researching and it turned out Google changed their anti-spam policy and dropped A LOT of links from their index around Oct 26 or so. From what I see is that they're trying to remove a lot of fake abusive AI-generated content from their index. I also had some nice insights and help in google community regarding my problem and they mentioned that they're cleaning stuff.

In general I think it's not so bad to fight with useless AI-generated content, on the other hand my content wasn't that sloppy, it was actually quite useful (at least for me and a few readers), distilled knowledge. But it fell into that "too bad to keep it in the index" criteria :/ I'll work on my projects content, it's not a problem and I've learned the lesson. But I'm wondering how many indie hackers / builders and "SEO hackers" were affected? Many of young products depend on the search traffic so they'll be suffering because their domain / content is not trustworthy. Do you think it's a temporary measure or we'll have higher quality expectations from search engines in the future?

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 2.0 ms ] thread
Google must improve their core search product because it’s far simpler and faster to ask LLMs for quick answers. If SEO spammers get run over in the process, that’s a good outcome.
Yep yep, google even tried to replace default SERP with AI reply but I think that didn't work well and they rolled back. And they've also introduced "AI performance" in search console to show impressions for AI, so they're moving towards new search product for sure