@tjrobertson52

Google just released a spam update, and this one is aimed at penalizing anyone who's trying to manipulate generative AI. So let's talk about what this means for anyone who's doing SEO or GEO right now, and whether or not you need to be worried about a penalty. So Google releases a few of these spam updates every year, and every time they release one of these updates, they always link to their spam policies.

They'll say, if you don't want to get penalized from this update, make sure you're in line with our spam policies. Well, they recently added a section to that policy saying that it violates the policy to do anything that will manipulate generative AI results. Includes one of the most effective ways to manipulate generator AI, which is placing recommendations on the pages that AI is citing before they give a response to the user.

So most often this means one of two things: placing comments on sites like Reddit, or paying publishers to recommend your product or service in their articles. Google saying that doing either of these things now put you at risk of a penalty, meaning Google could stop recommending your brand. The problem for Google, however, is that it's really hard to detect this.

How could Google's algorithm possibly know if a recommendation was placed by you or if you paid the publisher to place that recommendation? Sure, they could use pattern matching and probably get it right. More than half the time.

But they'd still get a lot of false positives, which means they'd be penalizing businesses that did nothing wrong, and they'd be making their search results worse for the users. And there's more bad news for Google, because you don't have to egregiously spam recommendations across the internet for this to be affected. Google tends to site the same pages and

oogle, because you don't have to egregiously spam recommendations across the internet for this to be affected. Google tends to site the same pages and posts over and over again, and so just getting a few surgically placed recommendations can have a huge impact. In the most extreme case of this I've seen, we were able to place a recommendation for one of our clients on a page that was cited on nearly every search for their service.

And from that one recommendation placed on one article, it went from being recommended in 20% of the prompts we were tracking to 40% of the prompts we were tracking. The article itself looks exactly the same as before we paid them for the recommendation. It just now lists our clients as number one instead of another business.

So if you're using an automated tool or service to spam recommendations about your business across the internet, you might want to think twice. But from my point of view, surgically placing targeted recommendations for your business on the key pages that AI is already telling you it trust, that's completely safe. Just like link building has always been a pillar of SEO, recommendation building is a pillar of GEO, or what?

I would just call SEO. Now that all search is becoming AI search.