On "Google’s Spam Update Now Reaches AI Answers. Enforcement Is Hard"

Google's spam update hitting AI answers is less about solving the problem and more about admitting they created a new surface area they can't control. The distinction between "earned" and "engineered" mentions was always fuzzy for traditional search results—it's even mushier in an AI layer that summarizes and rewrites source material. For practitioners, this means the old playbook of topical authority and clean backlinks still works, but you can't count on AI answers as a traffic lever anymore. The real game just got longer and slower.