Google Search has started testing the use of AI to replace headlines and website titles, a change that seems both unnecessary and a slippery slope.
As spotted by The Verge over the past “few months,” Google Search has been altering some headlines of news articles when they appear in search results. The altered headlines, the publication says, were not written by their staffers, which raised eyebrows as to where the new headlines were coming from.
Google confirmed that a “small” experiment is changing both the headlines of articles as well as titles from “other websites” in search results using AI. Google added that the idea is to “identify content on a page that would be a useful and relevant title to a users’ query” while “better matching titles to users’ queries and facilitating engagement with web content.” Apparently, if the experiment actually graduates to something that rolls out widely, it would not use generative AI, with Google saying that “if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI.”
Examples of this shared by The Verge include in story with the headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything,” which Google’s AI simplified to “”Cheat on everything” AI tool.” Another example was “Microsoft is rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible,” which Google changed to “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again.”
While it’s very common for articles to have an SEO title different from what the article shows — you’ll see this on most 9to5Google articles — those are usually written by the author/editorial team. Google will occasionally cut off pieces, but it’s very abnormal for Search to just completely rewrite an entire headline on its own.
As mentioned at the outset, it also seems completely unnecessary, and it ruins an important element of the web for publishers and site owners. If Google can just decide to show its own AI-generated title, it might completely misrepresent what’s actually being published to the web. This is on top of the fact that Google Search is already driving less and less traffic to the web, and AI “source” links aren’t making up for it either.
Google Discover previously tested AI headline rewrites, something that has now widely rolled out because they “[perform] well for user satisfaction.” While Google’s supposed goal of “better matching titles to users’ queries” might sound like a good idea at first, it almost defeats the purpose of the way Search works in the first place.
What do you think of this behavior?
More on Google Search:
- Google scraps ‘What people suggest’ feature that pulled health tips from Reddit using AI
- Google is making source links a bit more clickable in AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Gemini app and AI Mode adding product checkout, Google Search getting ‘Business Agent’
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