What Is “Discoverability” Now?
Once conceived as a reliable way to find content, it has mutated
Google has messed around with our content for a long time. The promise at the beginning was that they would organize the world’s information. But it hasn’t been that simple.
Once its basic citation-like model proved both untenable and less-profitable than something far more engineered, we had to endure decades of endless SEO workloads, compromises, concessions, and costs needed to meet Google’s increasingly difficult, opaque, and evolving standards.
No matter what, Google put Google first, providers and users be damned.
SEO is one thing, but messing with our content is another.
Remember Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? AMP created a standards-based walled garden, stripping branding off articles and creating false equivalency between legitimate information and propaganda. As one critic of the approach wrote in 2017:
Google’s AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it’s bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it’s bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.
By 2022, publishers were dropping out. In 2023, Google shut down the ranking engine. But they weren’t done messing around . . .
Now, there is a new game being played with Google’s Gemini AI ingesting, digesting, and regurgitating our content — all to benefit Google. These new tricks may be even more damaging:
- AI-generated summaries that seem to provide good-enough information for casual users, depriving publishers of click-throughs and decimating their page views, usage reports, site licensing value, and online ad impressions.
- As the Verge recently reported, headlines in the search results being regenerated by AI to revise them in misleading ways.
In December, the Verge reported that Google was replacing their headlines in Google Discover with “AI clickbait nonsense.” It seems to be an AI-generation approach to Google AMP — repackaged content with branding diminished or missing.
One story from PC Mag with the headline “Unpacking the DJI and US Drone Ban: Our Expert Answers All Your Questions” was given the headline “US reverses foreign drone ban” in Google Discover, a misleading and inaccurate AI-generated revision of a nuanced, thoughtful headline.
The approach is now being used in Google’s main search result listings, the Verge has found. As the reporter notes:
. . . I want to be clear: This is not normal. I’ve edited tech news for 15 years, paying close attention to SEO, and I’ve never before seen Google overwrite a headline in search results with something it created itself.
The open web — including scientific information — is being consumed by platform parasites using LLMs and AI to subsume original content while promising broader knowledge for all users because of their tech genius.