Google Search Quality Declining, Researchers Confirm

A study reveals an increase in low-quality content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, worsening the quality of search results despite Google's efforts to improve.

Researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence have found that the quality of Google search results is declining due to the prevalence of low-quality content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites.
The study analyzed 7,392 product-review search terms over a year on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, concluding that higher-ranked pages are more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and generally of lower text quality.
Despite the severity of the problem, Google's results did improve over the course of the study, and it performed significantly better compared to Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Experts agree that while Google is working on these issues, the overall quality of search results has worsened in recent years.
The advent of generative AI, capable of producing low-quality content quickly, is expected to further exacerbate the problem.