According to BBC Future, Google officially incorporated practices aimed at manipulating AI search results into its anti-spam policies in May, treating them on par with conventional SEO spam. The primary tactic behind this policy update is “prompt injection” — where website operators embed hidden instructions within page content to prompt Google’s AI systems to prioritize specific brands or content in AI Overviews or AI Search mode, effectively bypassing standard ranking mechanisms. Google states that this practice has transitioned from theoretical possibility to real-world abuse, and offending sites will face demotion or even removal from search results.
This update comes at a time when AI Overviews now account for nearly 60% of U.S. search results, giving rise to a burgeoning gray-market industry known as “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO), which focuses on optimizing content specifically for AI summaries rather than traditional algorithmic rankings. Consequently, content marketers must reevaluate common strategies such as employing AI-friendly structures or embedded recommendation statements to capture zero-click traffic. Google has made it clear that the new policy applies uniformly to both AI Overviews and AI Search mode, with no exceptions.