Is Google’s AI Overviews Breaking Its Own Spam Rules?
Google's AI Overviews are accused of repackaging content without credit, violating its own anti-spam principles and threatening publishers' traffic.
3 min readHighlights
Google’s AI Overviews mimic human-written articles without offering original insights.
SEO experts warn that AIO behavior mirrors content scraping and violates Google’s own spam policies.
Content creators risk losing traffic as Google rewrites their work into zero-click summaries.
Source: Image designed by Martech Scholars_A confused woman shrugs in front of the Google logo, symbolizing uncertainty over AI content and SEO rules.
Google’s AI Feature May Be the Spam It Warns Against
Search marketers are raising red flags about Google’s new AI Overviews (AIO)—the long-form, AI-generated answers now appearing in search results. Ironically, these responses may be the very type of content Google warns against in its own documentation: unoriginal, scraped, and lacking added value.
Why should content creators invest time in crafting insightful content if Google’s AIO simply rewrites it into a full-length answer, effectively eliminating the need for users to click the original source?
Repackaging Without Value: Is It Plagiarism?
Before AIO, Google featured short snippets—small excerpts linking users to full articles. But AIO now delivers complete answers, often spanning multiple paragraphs, mimicking full blog posts or articles.
And here’s the catch: it’s not offering original insights. Instead, it’s repurposing published content, something that would be called plagiarism in an academic setting—especially since AI cannot generate original thought or context.
A Real-World Example: Lily Ray’s Case
SEO expert Lily Ray highlighted this issue in a LinkedIn post and follow-up tweet. She discovered that Google’s AIO had rewritten nearly her entire article, offering an answer almost identical in length and structure.
She tweeted:
“It re-wrote everything I wrote in a post that’s basically as long as my original post.”
To test this, a side-by-side comparison using ChatGPT found that both her article and Google’s AIO answered nearly the same number of questions—13 in her piece vs. 12 in AIO’s response. Five key questions were mirrored almost exactly.
Examples of Question Copying:
- Spam in AI Overviews
- AIO: “Is there a spam problem affecting Google AI Overviews?”
- Lily Ray: “What types of problems have been observed in Google’s AI Overviews?”
- Exploitation by Spammers
- AIO: “How are spammers manipulating AI Overviews?”
- Lily Ray: “What new forms of SEO spam have emerged in response to AI Overviews?”
- Accuracy Issues
- AIO: “Can AI Overviews generate inaccurate or contradictory information?”
- Lily Ray: “Does Google currently fact-check or validate the sources?”
- SEO Industry Concerns
- AIO: “What concerns do SEO professionals have about the impact of AI Overviews?”
- Lily Ray: “Why is the ability to manipulate AI Overviews so concerning?”
- Deviation from E-E-A-T Principles
- AIO: “What kind of content is Google prioritizing?”
- Lily Ray: “How does the quality of information in AI Overviews compare to traditional Google standards?”
Double Trouble: Plagiarizing Multiple Sources?
In Lily’s case, Google didn’t just paraphrase her work. AIO’s answer also included five additional questions and answers seemingly taken from another article with a contrasting view—that Google is taking action against spam.
This suggests AIO may “synthesize” answers from multiple articles, combining perspectives without giving credit or offering unique interpretation. In plain terms, it appears to plagiarize from more than one source to form an “original” answer.
Key Takeaways:
- Google’s AIO is repurposing web content into long-form summaries without adding originality or value.
- The AI responses mimic article structures, answering identical questions from the original sources.
- This practice may contradict Google’s own guidelines on high-quality, non-spam content.
- Google’s AIO appears to plagiarize multiple articles, merging them into synthetic answers.
- These AI answers lack the E-E-A-T qualities Google says it values: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
- The lack of fact-checking mechanisms and incentives to click through is reducing traffic to original publishers.
Is Ranking on Google Now a Dead End?
The SEO and publishing communities are voicing frustration. With AIO offering comprehensive answers directly in search results, click-through rates are tanking. One marketer quipped:
“Ranking #1 on Google is the new place to hide a body—because no one clicks through anymore.”
The underlying fear? That Google’s AIO may now serve as a high-tech content scraper, violating the same spam policies it uses to penalize others.
Final Thoughts
By rewriting and blending published articles without offering fresh analysis, Google’s AI Overviews may be undermining the ecosystem of content creators it once supported. If Google continues down this path, it may face increasing backlash—not just from SEOs and marketers—but from users questioning whether they’re reading trustworthy, original content.
