The Tragedy of the Commons is coming for the internet:
Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
404 Media, 23 July 2025
The GenAI equivalent of Googlebombing (remember that?) was one of my first concerns when pondering the likely impact of GenAI search, way back when ChatGPT 3.5 came out and the prospect started looking real.
This kind of thing is, sadly, inevitable. And while Google’s got very solid experience of getting around attempts to manipulate its algorithms, it doesn’t have a great track record of releasing AI products that can distinguish facts from confabulations (remember both the Bard and the Gemini launches?).
The other inevitability is that this is also going to lead to more scammy marketing techniques. We’re going to be inundated with yet more of those snake oil salespeople popping up to promise brands results in GenAI, just as they used to in the early days of SEO – fuelled by similar tactics of vast networks of websites all interlinking to each other to create the impression of authority.
Only now, rather than using underpaid humans in content farms, they’ll be using GenAI to spit out infinite copy and infinite webpages, poisoning the GenAI well for everyone in pursuit of short-term profits.
