Study Confirms Decline in Google Search Results Quality

German researchers have confirmed that search engine results are indeed declining in quality due to the prevalence of low-effort content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites. Their year-long review of product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo revealed that higher-ranked pages are more optimized and monetized with affiliate marketing, leading to lower text quality. The study also found that search engines are susceptible to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and efforts to combat manipulation through algorithm updates have only had temporary effects. With the rise of generative AI, the internet is expected to become further inundated with low-quality content, posing a challenge for search engines to maintain quality results.