> I was able to demonstrate the problem by publishing a single article on my personal website about my hot-dog-eating prowess.

One blog post ... that's all it takes. i'm actually surprised it's that bad. i would have thought it'd take more effort, but i guess it could depend on some sort of purposeful weighting based on search rank during training?

> If a company or website is caught breaking the rules, it could be removed from or downranked in Google's search results. And if you're not on Google, it's like you don't exist.

> "You can give a company a penalty for their website," he says, "but there's nothing stopping them from paying 20 YouTube influencers to say their product is the best." And now, Google's AI is citing YouTube videos.

This makes me think of the stackoverflow seo spam problem we all had like 5 years ago. which ended up with spammers just constantly spinning up new sites all the time.

... the cat and mouse game is in full swing already.