You scroll through your Google Discover feed over your morning coffee, expecting a mix of breaking news, interesting hobbies, and updates from your favorite teams. Instead, you find a bizarre story about a celebrity, a nonsensical product review, or an article that seems to be written by someone who has a passing-but-not-quite-firm grasp of the English language.
If this experience feels familiar, you are not alone. This is the new face of digital pollution.
Google Discover, the personalized content feed on millions of Android and iOS devices, has become a prime target for a new, insidious wave of spam. This spam is not the clumsy, keyword-stuffed gibberish of the past. It is sleek, plausible, and generated at an impossible scale by the very artificial intelligence tools that are reshaping our digital world.
This influx of low-quality, AI-generated content is more than just an annoyance. It’s a direct threat to the platform’s usability, a source of widespread misinformation, and a direct attack on the livelihood of legitimate publishers. This article examines how this spam operation works, why it’s so effective, and what the fallout is for all of us.
The New Face of Digital Pollution: What Is AI-Generated Spam?
Traditional spam was easy to spot. It was full of spelling errors, obvious keyword stuffing, and nonsensical sentences. The new wave of AI-generated spam is a different beast entirely.
Powered by sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs), this content is:
- Grammatically Correct: It reads smoothly and passes basic quality checks.
- Plausible (at a Glance): It mimics the tone and structure of a real news story or blog post.
- Rapidly Produced: Spammers can generate thousands of articles per day for pennies.
This content is designed for one purpose: to trick Google’s algorithm for just long enough to get into the Discover feed. A successful placement, even for a few hours, can drive millions of views to a spammer’s website. Those views are then monetized through high-volume, low-quality display ads.
Why Google Discover Is a Prime Target for Spammers
Spammers target Google Discover because the potential reward is immense. Unlike traditional Google Search, where a site must slowly build authority to rank for competitive keywords, Discover operates differently.
- Massive, Sudden Traffic: Discover does not wait for a user to search. It pushes content to them. A single article that hits the feed can receive a flood of traffic, far more than a new site could ever hope to get from organic search.
- The “Newness” Factor: The feed prioritizes fresh, timely content. AI allows spammers to produce an endless stream of “new” articles, targeting trending topics, celebrity news, or even faking obituaries.
- Visual, Click-Based Medium: Discover is a visual feed of images and headlines. This format rewards sensational, clickbaity titles and images, which AI-driven spam campaigns excel at creating.
This combination creates a perfect storm where low-effort content can achieve massive, if temporary, success.
The Spammer’s Playbook: How AI Spam Infiltrates Your Feed
This is not a random act; it is a calculated, multi-step strategy. Spammers have reverse-engineered the signals that Google’s algorithm looks for, particularly trust.
Step 1: Acquire a “Trusted” Domain
A brand-new website has no authority and will be ignored by Google. To bypass this, spammers use a tactic known as “expired domain acquisition.”
They find and buy domains of once-legitimate businesses, old newspapers, or established blogs that have expired. These domains often retain their “domain authority” and a history of backlinks, which Google’s algorithm still views as signals of trust. A data journalist in France, Jean-Marc Manach, has reportedly tracked a database of over 8,300 fake sites in French, 300 in English, and 150 in German, many built on this very tactic.
Step 2: Mass-Produce “Plausible” Content
Once they have a “trusted” domain, the spammers unleash AI content generators. They scrape real news sites or identify trending topics and command the AI to write hundreds of articles about them.
These articles are often:
- Parasitic: Slightly rewritten versions of real news.
- Fake: Entirely fabricated stories about celebrities or events.
- Nonsensical: Bizarre product reviews or “how-to” guides that are technically grammatically correct but factually useless.
The Press Gazette documented cases where fake news stories on these sites received tens of millions of views from Google Discover before being caught.
Step 3: Monetize and Repeat
The website is loaded with programmatic ads. When the article is pushed to Discover, it gets a massive surge of traffic, and the spammer collects ad revenue. By the time Google’s algorithm or a human reviewer catches the site and blacklists it, the spammer has already profited. They then discard the domain and move on to the next one in their inventory. It’s a high-speed, low-cost, and highly repeatable operation.
The Collateral Damage: Why AI Spam Is a Crisis
This “spam-and-burn” model is degrading the entire digital ecosystem. The consequences are felt by users, publishers, and Google itself.
1. For Users: A Tsunami of Misinformation
The most immediate impact is on the user. The Google Discover feed is, for many, a primary source of news. When this feed is flooded with fake, low-quality, or outright false information, it erodes public trust. Users are forced to second-guess every headline, and the line between fact and fiction becomes dangerously blurred. This pollution of the information stream has real-world consequences, from public health scares to financial misinformation.
2. For Legitimate Publishers: A Fight for Survival
For every click a spam article gets, a legitimate publisher loses.
Publishers—from small bloggers to large news organizations—invest heavily in original reporting, fact-checking, and expert analysis. They abide by journalistic standards and work to build real E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
AI spam operations directly cannibalize their traffic. A publisher who has spent days researching an article can be beaten to the punch by an AI that “rewrites” their work in seconds and gets the Discover placement due to a technical loophole. This siphons off ad revenue and devalues the hard work of real human creators, making it harder for high-quality journalism to remain sustainable.
3. For Google: A New Algorithmic Arms Race
This spam wave creates an existential crisis for Google. The company’s entire value proposition is built on its ability to sort high-quality information from junk. AI spam is a direct assault on this core function.
Google’s own spam policies have been updated to target what it calls “scaled content abuse,” but the spammers are adapting just as quickly. The challenge is immense: How do you create an algorithm that can tell the difference between “good” AI-assisted content (like a writer using AI for research) and “bad” AI-generated spam (content created only to rank)? This cat-and-mouse game consumes huge resources and risks “false positives” where legitimate sites are accidentally penalized.
Google’s Response and the Fight Ahead
Google is not taking this threat lightly. The company has publicly stated it is “actively working on a fix” to address this specific type of spam. This response likely involves several key areas:
- Better Domain Vetting: Putting less “trust” in the history of expired domains that suddenly change ownership and publishing behavior.
- Improved Content Analysis: Using its own advanced AI to detect the subtle, statistical “fingerprints” that AI-generated text leaves behind.
- Strengthening E-E-A-T: Placing even more weight on signals that are difficult to fake, such as clear author profiles, a long-term consistent publishing history, and original reporting.
However, this is an arms race. As Google’s detectors get better, so will the AI spam generators.
Your Role: How to Fight Back
While the core problem requires an algorithmic solution from Google, users and publishers are not helpless.
Actionable Steps for Users
You have a direct role in cleaning up your own feed and helping Google identify spam.
- Report It: When you see a spammy or low-quality article in Discover, tap the three-dot menu. You can select “Don’t show stories from [site]” or “Report this content” to flag it as misleading or low-quality. This feedback is a vital signal.
- Be Skeptical: Before you click, look at the source. Is it a name you recognize? If not, be cautious.
- Curate Your Feed: Actively follow topics and publishers you trust. This gives Google better signals about the content you actually value.
Actionable Steps for Publishers
For legitimate creators, the only long-term defense is to build a brand that AI cannot replicate.
- Double Down on E-E-A-T: Make your human expertise the star. Use clear, prominent author bios with links to their social profiles and credentials.
- Focus on Originality: Create content that an AI cannot. This includes original interviews, unique data analysis, personal case studies, and strong, opinionated editorials.
- Build a Community: An AI can’t build a real community. Engage with your readers in the comments and on social media. Build a loyal audience that seeks out your content directly.
The Future of Content Curation
The rise of AI-generated spam is not a temporary glitch; it is the new normal. It signals a fundamental shift in the battle for online attention. The platforms we rely on for information are being flooded, and the technological barrier to creating “plausible” fakes has all but disappeared.
Ultimately, the solution will not just be a better spam filter. It will be a renewed focus on humanity. The future of content curation will depend on our ability and Google’s ability to elevate and reward genuine human expertise, original perspectives, and the demonstrable authority that can only be built, not generated.