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 by NewsGuard Technologies documents a dismal breakdown of the “programmatic” ad market, 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 the byproducts of bad chatbot programming. For instance, it features a screenshot of a site in Brazil that used the error message of an unidentified generative-AI model in a headline: “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own.” 

These content mills are also quite prolific; NewsGuard found one publishing an average of 1,200 “articles” a day during one week in June. At another, one alleged author’s byline appeared on 108 posts published on a single day. 

Google’s own ad rules specifically ban this sort of “low-quality content” and “replicated content.” The report says Google acknowledged NewsGuard’s questions about the report, asked for and received additional context about them, and then did not respond further.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson told PCMag: “We have strict policies that govern the type of content that can monetize on our platform. For example, we don’t allow ads to run alongside harmful content, spammy or low-value content, or content that's been solely copied from other sites. When enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the content rather than how it was created, and we block or remove ads from serving if we detect violations.”

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The unnamed companies whose brands got trashed by association with this programmatic distribution of their ads also declined to comment, with only four of 40 brands queried even answering with a no-comment reply. And none of the four UAINs assessed in the study with contact information visible responded to NewsGuard either.

The head of a New York-based trade group for news publishers, meanwhile, told PCMag that this points to a long-running problem with programmatic ads—the opacity of the entire system.

“Advertisers who don’t know which sites their ad campaigns are running on leave their investment, and their brands, significantly exposed,” emailed Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, who said this automated approach keeps advertisers in the dark about “the content and context in which their ads live.”

Editors' Note: This story was updated with comment from Google.