Google Is Placing Ads for Top Brands on Spammy, Chatbot-Generated Blogs
Google’s automated display-advertising system is serving up ads for brand-name companies on spammy, fake, and chatbot-written sites that egregiously violate Google’s own policies, according to a new study.
The June 2023 Misinformation Monitor report(Opens in a new window) by NewsGuard Technologies documents a dismal breakdown of the “programmatic” ad market(Opens in a new window), which is supposed to match ads with audiences automatically while respecting the brand-safety preferences of advertisers."
Instead, "major global brands are supporting the proliferation of unreliable artificial intelligence-generated news and information websites (UAINs)" with their ads dollars, the report says. “This programmatic approach thus funds low-quality and misinformation sites, while failing to protect ‘brand safety,’ with most of the ads placed by Google.”
NewsGuard works to rate news sites for their credibility and integrity (and provides a browser extension to help you spot misinformation merchants). Its report doesn’t name the companies involved but says they are “a wide variety of blue chip advertisers” that include “two of the world’s biggest consumer technology companies,” “two of the top US broadband providers,” and “a Silicon Valley digital platform.”
And almost all of this is Google’s fault, the report says: “More than 90% of the ads NewsGuard identified — 356 of 393 — were served to NewsGuard by Google Ads.”
That high number reflects how Google dominates the display-ads business—an overwhelming market share that antitrust investigations in the US and the European Union allege reflects anticompetitive behavior by Google.
The “UAIN” sites described in the study not only appear devoid of actual news but also seem rife with
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