Google has begun experimenting with using artificial intelligence to replace Search titles and website titles, a change that seems both unnecessary and slippery.
As seen The Verge Over the past “few months,” Google Search has been changing some of the headlines of news articles that appear in search results. According to the publication, the altered titles were not written by their staff, raising eyebrows as to where the new titles came from.
Google has confirmed that the “small” experiment is changing both article titles and titles from “other websites” in search results using artificial intelligence. Google added that the idea is to “identify on-page content that will be a useful and relevant title to users’ queries,” while also “better matching titles to users’ queries and making it easier to connect with web content.” Apparently, if the experiment ends up being something really widespread, it won’t use generative AI, with Google saying that “if we were to launch something based on this experiment, it wouldn’t use a generative model and we wouldn’t make headlines with gen AI.”
He shared examples of this The Verge enter the story with the title “I used the “cheat everything” AI tool and it didn’t help me to cheat anything,” simplified Google’s AI to a “Fake Everything” AI tool.” Another example is “Microsoft is rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible,” which Google changed to “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams Again.”
Although it is very common for articles to have a different SEO title than what the article shows, you will see this most of the time 9 to 5 Google articles — usually written by an author/editorial team. Google will occasionally cut out chunks, but it’s highly unusual for Search to completely rewrite an entire title on its own.
As mentioned at the beginning, it also seems completely unnecessary and destroys an important element of the web for publishers and site owners. If Google simply decides to display its AI-generated headline, it can completely distort what is actually published on the web. This is because Google Search is already driving less and less traffic to the web, and AI “source” links are not making up for it.
Google Discover rewrites previously tested AI titles, something common now because they “work well for user satisfaction”. While Google’s goal of “better matching titles to users’ queries” seems like a good idea at first glance, it pretty much defeats the purpose of how Search works in the first place.
What do you think about this behavior?
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