Google Search test replaces website headlines and titles with AI

Google Search has begun testing the use of AI to replace website headlines and titles, a change that seems unnecessary and a slippery slope.

How he saw it The edge Over the past “months,” Google Search has been altering some news article headlines when they appear in search results. The changed headlines, the publication says, were not written by its staff, raising eyebrows about where the new headlines came from.

Google confirmed that a “small” experiment is changing both article headlines and “other websites” titles in search results using AI. Google added that the idea is to “identify content on a page that would be a useful and relevant title for a user’s query” while also “better matching titles to user queries and making it easier to interact with web content.” Apparently, if the experiment actually becomes something that is widely deployed, it wouldn’t use generative AI, and Google says that “if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it wouldn’t use a generative model and we wouldn’t be making headlines with generative AI.”

Examples of this shared by The edge include in the story with the title “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything“, which Google’s AI simplified as “AI tool to cheat on everything.” Another example was “Microsoft is rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible”, which Google changed to “Co-pilot changes: Marketing teams are at it again.”

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While it is very common for articles to have a different SEO title than the one the article displays, you will see this in most 9to5Google Articles: These are usually written by the author or the editorial team. Google occasionally cuts out parts, but it’s highly unusual for Search to simply completely rewrite an entire title on its own.

As mentioned at the beginning, it also seems completely unnecessary and ruins an important element of the web for editors and site owners. If Google decides to display its own AI-generated headline, it could completely misrepresent what is actually published on the web. This is on top of the fact that Google Search is already driving less and less traffic to the web, and AI “source” links don’t make up for it either.

Google Discover previously tested headline rewriting with AI, something that has now been widely implemented because “(they perform) well for user satisfaction.” While Google’s supposed goal of “better matching titles to user queries” may seem like a good idea at first, it almost defeats the purpose of the way Search works in the first place.

What do you think of this behavior?