Originally Posted on The Search Herald by Search Engine Roundtable
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge posted a new article with the intent to both rank for [best printer] in Google Search, as well as mock Google for how he can game Google’s search rankings using AI-generated content, while throwing in some affiliate links. Google’s John Mueller responded saying, "People seem to really enjoy it."
I will say, Nilay wrote a fun and enjoyable piece, you can read it here, if you haven’t already but I assume most of you have already seen it by now.
It ranks number two in Google Search for me in New York on all browsers I’ve tested:
He wrote:
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
He then rants about how "an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!" Yep, the whole thing about how SEOs and Google ruined the internet…
He added, "The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out."
The article is then followed by a bunch of AI content generated by Gemini.
I’ve been waiting to see a Googler who works on search respond to any of the SEO comments about this piece. And now we have it, John Mueller said, "People seem to really enjoy it" and he is not wrong.
They also spoke about this on their podcast at 27:45 into it:
Forum discussion at X.
