When Google announced another update to its spam rules this week, the company probably expected attention to fall on how the changes might affect websites. Instead, much of the discussion online turned back on Google itself. A viral post pointed out that the AI-generated summaries now appearing at the top of search results seem to break many of the same standards Google applies to others.
The criticism spread fast because it played into a feeling that has been building for some time. Site owners have watched traffic slip since AI Overviews launched, with impressions rising but clicks falling. For many of them, the summaries look less like a helpful feature and more like a barrier between readers and the sources that produced the information in the first place.
Online Reactions Capture Frustration
What pushed the debate further was how strongly people on social media connected with the viral message. Some laughed at the irony, others compared the answers directly to spam, and a few even suggested the practice deserved legal scrutiny. A number of users pointed to odd or unsafe results they had seen in the past, including strange suggestions that had little grounding in fact.
There was also talk about fairness. Smaller publishers are warned not to flood the web with low-value content, yet many see Google doing the same when its system recycles what has already been written elsewhere. That sense of double standards, more than anything, fueled the anger.
A Familiar Pattern Resurfacing
This is not the first time people have accused Google of leaning too heavily on other people’s work. More than a decade ago, a different viral post described the company’s definition boxes as little more than scraped content. Back then the complaint was mostly about convenience snippets. Now the summaries produced by AI cover far more queries and take up more of the page, which makes the problem feel much larger to those who rely on visibility.
The Bigger Issue
The discussion points to a wider change in how the web functions. AI tools now sit between readers and publishers, yet they are built on top of the same content they push further down the screen. The viral post and the flood of responses show just how uneasy many people feel about that balance. What started as a simple joke about spam rules has become a way for users to voice deeper concerns about where search is heading and what that means for the future of online publishing.
Notes: This post was edited/created using GenAI tools. Image: DIW-Aigen.
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