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Technology news The Verge has published a 700-word article that is half filled with content generated by Google Gemini and a heavy dose of sarcasm. the competitive demand (best printer 2024).
Sounds familiar? It should be. We wrote about the exact same thing a little over a year ago How The Verge played Google with its ‘best printer 2023’ article.
Why we care. Google has been telling us a lot lately that we should write for people, not Google. This article will likely infuriate many brands who invest time and resources into researching products in the hopes of rising to the top of Google search results. Others will use this as proof that experience, expertise, authority and reliability do not matter.
Still, the article ultimately answers the question (“the best printer is still whatever Brother laser printer you can buy”) – perhaps in the most ridiculous way possible.
The article. The title of The Verge’s April 2 article gives you a taste of what to expect: Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, label printing, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer, we are all printers. SEO best practices? Not here.
Google Gemini. Last year, The Verge used ChatGPT to generate half of its content. This year that honor went to Google Gemini:
“Here’s what Google Gemini had to say when I asked him about the Brother laser printers, which isn’t worth reading, but is by definition an incredible example of experience, expertise, authority and reliability, because Google has the whole the internet synthesizes for this information. right? Isn’t that the whole idea of these LLMs, or are we just fooling ourselves?
How it ranks on Google. I currently see the article in Position 2 (Chrome, incognito) about a search for (best printer 2024). I see it in Position 1 (under SGE) when I am logged in. Others have reported seeing it lower (Position 4 or lower).
Time will tell if the content farm ecosystem will run fake updates, as the Verge article put it, to drive this article down.
Google response. Google’s John Mueller was asked how these types of articles score so well on Google.
- “People really seem to enjoy it,” says Mueller posted on X.
This is probably a correct explanation. We know it from the antitrust investigation documents and the testimony of Pandu Nayak that user interactions (e.g. clicks) play a major role in what scores and what doesn’t. And The Verge may be a tech rag, but it is an authoritative one.
Little changed in a year. The editor-in-chief of The Verge Nilay Patel told Search Engine Land a year ago:
- “The internet is about to be flooded with AI-generated content explicitly designed to game its algorithms. The fact that I do this is the least of Google’s problems. At least I’m honest,” Patel said.
It would have been more surprising to Patel than this article was not ranking. That was the point – and the problem – that Patel pointed out then, and it will remain so in 2024.
- “The architecture of the web is built to Google’s specifications,” says Patel. “Here’s the skeleton of every web page and you put a bunch of stuff in there to prove you’re smart.”
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