Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.
Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.
For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.
What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.
Like I wrote in January, when Google decided it wouldn’t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover from The Verge and our competitors, this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.
(Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has filed a lawsuit against Google, seeking damages from its illegal ad tech monopoly.)
The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they’re not yet the kind of tripe we’ve seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.)
Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like “US reverses foreign drone ban” — on a story reporting the opposite — the nonsense headlines we’re seeing in Google Search are downright tame:
But these are just the first headlines we’ve seen Google change. They may be the canary in the coal mine. Google may alter the deal even further.
While Google says this is an “experiment,” you shouldn’t assume that means the company won’t roll it out more widely, because Google originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature, one that “performs well for user satisfaction.”
Google did not explain why the company is no longer respecting the headline identifiers it has long encouraged newsrooms to use. The company did answer some specific questions via email, though.
Google told us that the overall idea is to “identify content on a page that would be a useful and relevant title to a users’ query.” The goal is “better matching titles to users’ queries and facilitating engagement with web content,” according to Kutz.
This test is “not specific to news publications, but looking at how we can improve titles horizontally,” according to Adriance. Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that “if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI,” according to De Leon. Google did not explain how it might replace our story titles without generative AI.
Mostly, Google’s answers tried to normalize the idea of replacing headlines in search — suggesting that this is just one of the “tens of thousands of live traffic experiments” that Google runs to test possible improvements to Google Search, and reminding us that it’s already been tweaking the titles of webpages in Search to help users for many years now.
But I want to be clear: This is not normal. I’ve edited tech news for 15 years, paying close attention to SEO, and I’ve never before seen Google overwrite a headline in search results with something it created itself.
The changes that Google typically makes to a news story’s title are far simpler. If Google’s algorithms decide a headline is too long or lopsided, it’ll sometimes show you only part of that headline, lopping off the beginning or end. Here are two recent examples of that:
Or, if a story has two headlines, one that we flag as the “search headline” and one that we flag as the “on-page headline,” Google will sometimes display the on-page headline instead of the one we crafted for a more general search audience. (We currently set those headlines inside WordPress, the popular content management platform behind many leading websites, but I’ve used those fields inside other backends too.) This tendency of Google Search has been annoying over the years, but nowhere near as annoying as an AI creating “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again” out of whole cloth.
Changing headlines, and their meaning, makes journalism less trustworthy at a time when powerful institutions are trying to discredit it, and when many news organizations are struggling just to keep the lights on.
We’ve warned for years that Google is prioritizing AI search over the “10 blue links,” and I am frequently frustrated that its Gemini AI search doesn’t encourage clicking through to actual news sources. But I figured that I could always fall back to those blue links to get a relatively unadulterated experience. Now, I have to wonder.