"This is a big problem for Google," he said. In a conversation with BI, Bruns echoed Orosz's criticism. "Internet search like Google is becoming much more useless, even as they try and battle all this. First sites/articles, then images and soon videos," Orosz wrote. "Generating absolute junk with AI just to make some $$ is happening at alarmingly fast pace. It's also not Causal's only attempt to use AI to boost its ranking: Ward's business partner Mack Grenfell previously wrote about using generative AI to work with Causal as early as October 2021. It's not clear exactly when Causal began posting the Exceljet-inspired articles, but its traffic has been climbing steadily for more than a year. Using those URLs as guidance, the tools promptly spat out a stream of articles on the same subjects, no human author required. They took the URLs for each page and fed them all into AI content-generation tools. AI is smarter than 99% of the people writing those articles." The Exceljet heist, explainedĪn expat from the north of England now living in Dubai, Ward and his business partner worked to boost the presence of the business-planning software startup Causal on Google - in part by using generative AI to feed off Exceljet's existing content.įirst, they downloaded Exceljet's "sitemap" - essentially, a directory of the roughly 1,800 pages on Exceljet's website. "They copy and regurgitate content from the top few Google results. "Most websites, especially large-scale projects, will hire cheap writers who know nothing about the topic they're writing about," he added. "It's unusual that something acceptable, if done once, suddenly becomes unethical when reproduced at scale," he wrote on X earlier this month. Ward argues that what he's done is no different than any other SEO content strategist generative AI has just made it way faster. The Exceljet heist is his AI-powered handiwork. It's SEO on steroids, and Jake Ward has been more audacious than most industry players in taking advantage of this. Now, AI models can knock that out in seconds, thanks to new startups such as Jasper and SEO.AI. Once you know which Google search terms (aka keywords) to target, there's no longer any need to ask humans to laboriously type up a relevant article. SEO experts were quick to see the commercial potential of generative AI when ChatGPT burst onto the scene over a year ago. The basic idea is to find out what people are searching for and deliver relevant content for those queries. SEO professionals help websites improve their ranking in search results, using tactics ranging from official Google trend analysis to more dubious tricks to game the system. The central battleground where this is playing out is Search Engine Optimization. I just don't know whether we're going to do that as fast as we need to." "We're going to have to fundamentally change how we relate to information. "The usual signal methods of what's true are no longer clear, and trusted sources like Google searches don't turn up the right things anymore," said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies the impact of AI. That's quickly upending the existing rules of the web - and it's a particularly thorny challenge for Google. Content on any topic can now be generated with the press of a button, and it's all but impossible to spot the difference between this synthetic stuff and what a human might produce on the same subject. "It's just wrong to make money on that."Įxceljet's struggles raise big questions about the future of the internet. "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. The heist was part of a wildly successful campaign that sent traffic to the perpetrator's client up an estimated 60-fold, even as Exceljet's online visits halved. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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