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A website has found itself the victim of a pernicious new online scheme that its perpetrators are shamelessly bragging about: an "SEO heist," the latest example of how generative AI is being used to accelerate the deterioration of the search engines that form the backbone of the Internet.
The website in question is Exceljet, a hub on everything to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns started noticing a dip in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to imitate nearly all of his website's articles with inferior and often error-riddled copies designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet's traffic.
"It's one thing to get outranked by an article that is arguably better than the article that you wrote, but it's something else to get outranked by an article that was written by a machine that no human ever reviewed," Bruns told Business Insider. "It's just wrong to make money on that."
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, describes the tricks and tactics used to help rank websites higher in search results, which leads to more clicks. It serves a practical purpose, but the ruthless gaming of search engines, and of Google especially, has long taken a toll on the broader internet's functionality, ranking bogus results over useful ones.
futurism.com
The website in question is Exceljet, a hub on everything to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns started noticing a dip in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to imitate nearly all of his website's articles with inferior and often error-riddled copies designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet's traffic.
"It's one thing to get outranked by an article that is arguably better than the article that you wrote, but it's something else to get outranked by an article that was written by a machine that no human ever reviewed," Bruns told Business Insider. "It's just wrong to make money on that."
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, describes the tricks and tactics used to help rank websites higher in search results, which leads to more clicks. It serves a practical purpose, but the ruthless gaming of search engines, and of Google especially, has long taken a toll on the broader internet's functionality, ranking bogus results over useful ones.
Man Horrified When Someone Uses AI to Reword and Republish All His Content, Complete With New Errors
Exceljet has found itself the victim of an "SEO heist," losing web traffic to a shameless imitator that used AI to hijack its articles.
futurism.com
