There are lots of fingers rightfully pointed at AI here, but its just excacerbating a more fundamental issue: Why would anyone fund news and web content when its more economical to fund pure SEO optimization?
I’ve noted how many content feeds I follow in RSS have gone “SEO farming” over the last few years, and not even just because of AI. So much evergreen content repurposed with life-101 titles like “How to start your Tesla”. Ugh.
Content content everywhere and not a human in site (pun intended)….
The bots build content to break the algorithms better than humans can so we only see bot content organically or paid/boosted content from humans? Intentional?
> Red Ventures’ business model is straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for “high-intent” queries and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links.
And thats why modern search is garbage.
Its ridiculous that Google doesnt do anything useful against this to the point that it became a viable business model.
It's like Demand Media all over again, but probably way more computationally expensive the search engines to detect these new machine generated content farms.
There is nothing new here. CNET was selling our emails to spammers in the 1990's. I know because ai used tagged emails and cnet@mydomain got a lot of spam.
