Viral post accuses Google’s AI Overviews of breaking its own spam rules

A viral social media post is roasting Google’s AI Overviews – the company’s AI-generated answers in search results – accusing it of breaking the spam policies Google enforces on everyone else.

The post. It was published by Nate Hake on X, minutes after Google’s announcement about the release of the August 2025 spam update:

“I’d like to report a spammer called “AI Overviews”

It’s coming up #1 for a ton of queries & violates all these Google policies:

-No first-hand experience
-Uses extensive automation
-No expertise
-Primarily summarizes what others have written

Nate Hake X Spammer

Screenshots of Google’s own guidelines accompanied his critique, making the punchline hit even harder.

Why we care. Many websites have been losing organic search traffic since the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews last year. We’ve also seen the great decoupling of search, with impressions up and clicks down. AI has been accused of contributing to the death of the business model of the web, as Cloudflare put it.

Flashback. In 2014, a similar viral moment hit when digital marketer Dan Barker quipped that Google itself was a “scraper site” – using Google’s own definition box as proof. That tweet, echoing frustrations among SEOs, racked up more than 14,000 retweets.

  • Publishers who thought Google was borrowing content too heavily from other sites to generate the direct answers it displayed in its own search results in 2014 would be horrified by Google 2025. And indeed, many of us have been.

The big picture. Google’s AI Overviews have been under heavy scrutiny for accuracy, usefulness, and their impact on publishers. By highlighting Google’s own rules, this viral post crystallizes a long-running tension: search engines taking more space at the top of results while holding websites to standards they don’t meet themselves.

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About the Author

Danny Goodwin

Danny Goodwin is Editorial Director of Search Engine Land & Search Marketing Expo – SMX. He joined Search Engine Land in 2022 as Senior Editor. In addition to reporting on the latest search marketing news, he manages Search Engine Land’s SME (Subject Matter Expert) program. He also helps program U.S. SMX events. Goodwin has been editing and writing about the latest developments and trends in search and digital marketing since 2007. He previously was Executive Editor of Search Engine Journal (from 2017 to 2022), managing editor of Momentology (from 2014-2016) and editor of Search Engine Watch (from 2007 to 2014). He has spoken at many major search conferences and virtual events, and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts.


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