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“It feels almost like all control is being taken away,” Shelby Blackley, a manager of newsroom SEO at The Athletic and a cofounder of WTF Is SEO?, an industry newsletter, told me. She was referring to an unsettling trend: Google has been taking an increasingly heavy hand in reshaping how content appears on its platform. Blackley and Jessie Willms started WTF Is SEO? in 2021, with the aim of helping journalists better understand a concept already well known in the marketing world. Lately, they have been paying close attention to the shifts in Google’s strategy—and how news organizations are starting to notice the changes.
Google’s most recent move was experimenting with rewriting headlines for search results using LLMs, as was reported by The Verge in late March. In The Verge’s case, Google changed “Microsoft is rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible” to “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again.” The story explained that staffers at The Verge “spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.” As Willms put it, when a platform changes a headline, “it’s extremely frustrating for people working in journalism, because there are already so many reasons why people don’t trust news organizations.”
When reached for comment by CJR, a Google spokesperson provided a statement: “For many years, we’ve used automated systems to generate useful snippets (including titles) in Search.… We ran a small experiment that similarly aims to help people find and visit relevant pages by better matching titles to the query, when appropriate.” The statement added that, in The Verge’s case, Google had used an LLM to generate a headline from text found on the article page. The company does not have plans to roll out this feature, though it will run similar experiments in the future—and generally runs tens of thousands of live traffic experiments every year.
The adjustments have been piling up since January, when, as also reported by The Verge, Google Discover, which delivers personalized content for users of its smartphone app, officially adopted a policy of headline summarization. Google Discover has been writing headlines that are plainly incorrect, such as generating the headline “US reverses foreign drone ban” to promote a PCMag article that reported the opposite. (Google claims these are only intended to act as titles for “trending topics,” but they are written with the trappings of headlines and often link to just one story.)
For those who work on amplifying their news organizations’ content via search, these developments have been disconcerting. The headline experiment drew backlash from an array of SEO experts, publications, and critics. It’s not new for Google to change how content is shared, and for newsrooms to pivot accordingly. What is new, according to Willms, is that Google is taking more steps than ever before toward repackaging content, without publishers’ involvement—and using AI to summarize and market news.
This trend is exemplified by AI Overviews in search, which began summarizing user searches at the top of results pages in 2024. A report last week by the New York Times found that one in ten answers to queries in AI Overviews was incorrect—which, given the volume of searches, means hundreds of thousands of inaccuracies every hour.
Other ongoing Google experiments point in the same direction. Web Guide, a search tool being tested, replaces Google’s current ranking system with one powered by Gemini, Google’s AI. Search results also appear with an AI Overview, as usual, but each result has an AI-generated description.
Google is facing an increasing number of legal challenges to its use of news coverage, which argue that it acts more like a publisher than a platform, at news organizations’ expense. Last month, a judge dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against Google by two small news publishers, which alleged that Google had monopoly power over search and had turned into “America’s largest news publisher.” “They’re not doing the work to get this material,” Andrew Bagley, one of the plaintiffs, told the Seattle Times. “They’re using their AI tools, their search engine tools and other platforms to take advantage of the work we’re doing, and that’s where the expense is.”
SEO editors are, of course, used to adapting to Google’s changes. A large part of SEO editors’ responsibilities includes understanding Google’s ever-changing search rank algorithm, writing headlines and generating metadata that adhere to Google’s guidelines and are search-friendly, all while maintaining a newsroom-specific style. Their relationship with Google seems to be shifting. “A growing sentiment is that Google is not a partner but a competitor,” Willms told me. “The exchange used to be that you get all of our content in exchange for visibility on the most valuable place on the internet. Now it’s taking your content, basically not attributing it to you or giving you any meaningful clicks, and reaping all the benefits.”
For SEO editors who were typically focused on Google traffic, “it almost has caused an identity crisis of the SEO editor to consider more than just Google,” Blackley said. Some publishers are attempting to diversify referral sources on Reddit or focusing on enticing people directly to their site. Blackley emphasized that traditional search isn’t dead, but editors need to be more open to other channels.
“Sometimes audience editors overreact to change, not just on Google but also on other platforms—but anything that eats away at the trust people have in our institutions is worth being genuinely concerned over,” Willms said. For Blackley, that means “it’s more important than ever to have audience and SEO editors, because people can look for information in so many more places.”
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