alt Hacker NewsSuspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
Replies
Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
I doubt Pomelli would get ranked higher. Google biases ads to their highest spenders. The more you spend, the better your ads perform. Nobody using something like Pomelli is giving Google enough money to rank highly. They could outrank the very lowest spenders, namely scammers and dropshippers whose ads are already AI slop anyway. But, really, who cares?
the way it will work is ai slop will rank high, and pomelli will generate the best ai slop.
They are going all in on tolerating third party AI slop on Youtube. That feels like an executive decision at this point.
Guessing: because they have AI products in the pipeline that can create Youtube shorts or similar.
This aspect will be interesting to watch.
Edit: Youtube Premium should include an optional AI slop filter.
I doubt that the product folks over at Google overseeing an experimental project like this have such outsized influence over something core like the ads engine