The fact that this has been going on for several years makes me believe Google either doesn't care or the problem is particularly hard to fix (less believable)
It has been an ongoing battle for 10-15 years at this point. Search engines are constantly battling people trying to game their systems. I have to wonder if Google hasn't lost the thread a bit, inside their surely quite complex algorithm black boxes.
For a while now Google has suggested that the best way to rank well is to have human readable content and focus on user experience. At the same time, natural language generation has come leaps and bounds, to the point where sometimes even I, a human, can't tell if an article has been spun by a bot or not.
So if Google starts ranking human readable content, and robots can now produce human readable content, what is the next ranking signal they can use to differentiate spam from humans? Are we going to end up with "Verified Websites" ala verified Twitter handles?
A huge portion of the web at this point is just bots communicating with eachother, and legitimate business systems having to process bots participation on the internet. I imagine the portion of the web that Google crawls that is legitimate versus that which is bot generated would surely be majority bots, just because of how fast they can generate content. One thing they can't do as easily though is register domains, so it may be one of the better points of defense.
Google has at the very least neglected its search for many years now and recently has also actively made it worse through all the censorship and thought control stuff. I find it rather surprising because essentially all of google’s success is lynchpinned by search. All it would take is for a narrative to dominate that the best results can be found elsewhere, which does not seem particularly remote, considering how much damage google has done to its search.
I noticed issues since Matt Cutts left. No one care anymore. There are AI generated website that have been running for years, ranking highly in Google.
