- Over the past year, website Exceljet has been the victim of an AI-powered “SEO heist.”
- Online marketers used artificial intelligence to clone thousands of Exceljet's articles for competitors.
- This plot shows how generative AI is transforming the web and posing thorny questions for Google.
Traffic was backed up, but David Brands didn't know why.
His website for working with Microsoft Excel, Exceljet, has been popular since 2012 and quickly became a well-paying full-time job for the Utah resident.
However, in late 2022, the number of visitors to Exceljet began to decline and continued to decline thereafter. The site relies heavily on his Google search traffic, and with the tech giant regularly updating how it ranks his website, Brands has found himself falling out of the company's favor. I wondered if this was the case. He also undertook a technical restructuring. Perhaps it has something to do with it?
Then in the fall of 2023, a friend flagged a social media post and it all made sense. Mr. Brands is the victim of one of his first “SEO heists” in the new generative AI era. It was an audacious plot to copy his website and use powerful new artificial intelligence tools to siphon off his hard-earned Google referral traffic.
The heist was part of a highly successful campaign that saw Exceljet's online visits cut in half while traffic to the perpetrators' customers increased by an estimated 60 times.
“It's one thing to rank high for an article that's definitely better than the article you wrote, it's another thing to rank high for an article written by a machine that no one has ever reviewed.” Brands told Business Insider. “It's wrong to make money from it.”
Exceljet's struggles raise big questions about the future of the Internet. Content on any topic can now be generated at the push of a button, and it's almost impossible to tell the difference between this synthetic and human-created content on the same subject. This is a particularly troubling challenge for Google, as it rapidly upends the existing rules of the web.
“The usual ways of telling what is true are no longer clear, and reliable sources like Google search no longer provide the right information,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. A.I. “We're going to have to fundamentally change the way we interact with information. I don't know if we'll be able to do that as quickly as we need to.”
Strengthen SEO
The central battleground where this plays out is search engine optimization. SEO experts use everything from official Google trend analysis to other strategies to help your website rank better in search results. Suspicious tricks to exploit the system. The basic idea is to find out what people are searching for and serve them content that is relevant to those queries.
SEO professionals quickly realized the commercial potential of generative AI when ChatGPT was introduced over a year ago. Once you know which her Google search terms (aka keywords) to target, you won't need a human to painstakingly type in relevant articles for you. Now, thanks to startups like Jasper and his SEO.AI, AI models can beat that in seconds.
This is SEO on steroids, and Jake Ward has been bolder than most in the industry in capitalizing on it. The Exceljet heist is his AI-powered handiwork. And he is unapologetic.
Ward insists that what he's done is no different than any other SEO content strategist. Generative AI has made it much faster. “It's unusual for something that was once acceptable to suddenly become unethical when reproduced on a large scale,” he wrote in X magazine earlier this month.
“Most websites, especially large projects, will end up hiring writers who know nothing about the subject they're writing about at low wages,” he added. “They're copying and regurgitating content from Google's top few search results. AI is smarter than 99% of the people writing those articles.”
Exceljet robbery explained
Ward, an expat from the north of England who currently lives in Dubai, and his business partner will increase the presence of business planning software startup Causal on Google by using generative AI that leverages existing content in Exceljet. I worked on it.
First, I downloaded Exceljet's “sitemap,” a directory of about 1,800 pages on Exceljet's website. They took the URLs of each page and fed them all into an AI content generation tool. Using these URLs as guidance, the tool instantly spit out a stream of articles on the same subject, without the need for a human author.
It's unclear exactly when Causal started posting Exceljet-inspired articles, but his traffic has been steadily increasing for over a year.Nor is Causal's only attempt to use AI to boost its rankings: Ward's Business Partner mac grenfell We previously wrote about working with Causal using generative AI as early as October 2021.
Web analytics tool Ahrefs estimates that as of early May 2022, Causal averaged less than 10,000 organic traffic visits per week. It reached 200,000 in early 2023 and peaked at more than 600,000 per week in October.
During the same period, Exceljet's traffic plummeted. In 2022, the average number of monthly users was about 2 million, but by 2023 that number has fallen to just over 1 million, Brands said. (Google's algorithm changes, Exceljet's tweaks to his website, and his other non-AI expansion competition may also have contributed to the decline.)
Repulsion
On November 24, Ward posted on X about targeting Exceljet, saying it had “stole” traffic from its competitors.
The post went viral and sparked an immediate backlash. Gergely Orosz, a well-known software engineer and newsletter author, argued that this poses a serious problem. Threats to Google.
“Using AI to generate absolute garbage just to make money is happening at an alarming rate. First it's sites and articles, then images, then soon videos,” Orosz said. wrote. “Internet searches like Google are becoming less and less useful despite trying to combat all of this. Trustworthy sources of information become more valuable.”
In a conversation with BI, Brands echoed Orosz's criticism. “This is a big problem for Google,” he said. “If people keep finding crappy articles at the top of search results, you wonder if Google is doing a good job, but if the articles are near or near the top of search results, The problem would be resolved given the fact that it might appear 'Apparently it's a canonical one. ”
Even more frustrating for Bruns, when he reviewed the AI-generated Causal posts, he found factual errors in several of the articles. One of his was describing a feature that supposedly doesn't exist in Excel. Google also uses this AI howler as “Featured snippets” displayed prominently at the top of related search results, Brands said.
“When I started paying attention to the quality of articles, I realized I was losing traffic to things that didn't make sense,” he says.
When contacted by BI, Ward initially said he would be available for an interview, but then declined to discuss the record. “The client in question does not want our actions to be further exposed,” he said in a voice message.
Kozal did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Google responds
Google isn't making a fuss about AI-generated content. The $1.67 trillion search giant won't penalize synthetic articles in search results as long as it deems the content useful to users.
“AI can be a useful tool to help people do more creative work, including developing better content,” Google spokeswoman Jennifer Kutz said in a statement. “But like any tool, it can be misused, so we're doing a lot to protect the integrity of our searches and ensure we take a responsible approach.”
However, if Google determines that AI is primarily being used to manipulate search rankings, it will not be allowed. This is an ambiguous decision and can be difficult even for an AI-savvy company like Google.
Immediately after Ward posted the thread, Causal's organic web traffic fell off a cliff. According to Ahrefs data, in early October, organic traffic was reaching more than 610,000 visits per week. By mid-December, the number had plummeted to about 190,000. According to some experts, it looked suspiciously as if Google had taken a “manual action.” Deliberately penalize a website In search rankings. (Google declined to comment on her website specifically.)
“I can't confirm whether there is a penalty,” said Patrick Stocks, an SEO expert at Ahrefs. “But there's basically no other way to cause a drop like this than by deleting a bunch of pages.”
Google competed
Google is hard at work building its own AI models to churn out automated text and other information while making decisions about synthetic content on other websites.
The New York Times reported that Google is looking to sell some of these generative AI tools to major news publishers. And then an even bigger change occurs. Google is building Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental AI question-answering tool built directly into search. It could be the biggest change in Google's 25-year history, delivering personalized answers directly to users.
Such AI-powered search experiences can reduce traffic by up to 25% for many websites, says venture capital firm Insight Partners.
“As with any major disruption, you either adapt to the disruption or ultimately perish,” said Gary Service, managing partner at Insight.
This is a one-two punch for publishers and websites that rely on Google for traffic. That link will likely be demoted under Google's AI-generated content, and the remaining traditional search results will compete with other websites that use AI to automatically create content. I will do it. .
dip your toes
Media companies are already dipping their toes in the waters of AI, sometimes with disastrous results. Gizmodo Publisher, G/O mediawas accused earlier this year of publishing an AI-generated article that contained numerous factual errors. The publisher of Sports Illustrated recently fired the magazine's CEO. Following the uproar over the publication of an article featuring fake writers and AI-generated profile photos.
Still, other publishers are not giving up. Michael Nunez, editorial director of technology news site VentureBeat, encourages writers to experiment with his AI tools. Nick Carlson, BI's global editor-in-chief, said in April that newsrooms would carefully learn how to use this new technology.
“What's most important to us is that we never rely on AI blindly or uncritically, using it as a tool that augments rather than replaces human skill and judgment,” VentureBeat said. Nunez told BI. (Disclosure: Both Nuñez and the author of this article serve on the board of directors of the San Francisco Press Club.)
Even Exceljet's Bruns is starting to use AI in its workflows, despite Ward's SEO heist.
“Oftentimes, when I finish writing an article, I feed it back to ChatGPT for a review of the article. Typos and logical errors are what I'm most concerned about,” Bruns says. “I use it sometimes to generate ideas,” he added.
“Sometimes I ask: Can you tell me how to solve this problem in Excel?”
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