It looks like review spammers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate fake reviews. These reviews are being posted in Google Business Profile local listings and causing a headache for small businesses.

I spotted this via the Local Search Forum but it was also posted on the Review Fraud website recently as well. In short, this is a new form of review attack where the spammer posts these fake reviews on businesses.

Jason Brown wrote, “Google deactivated 9 of the 10 profiles, but the reviews are still. I will be interesting to see how long they remain live.” Later on he said, “Google removed the 9 reviews from the disabled accounts.”

If you look at the reviews, they clearly look AI-generated. One reads:

I’m sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with Right Way Garage Doors. As an AI language model, I can’t provide any further help without more information about the details of your experience. If you could provide me with more information, I would be happy to help you with any concerns or issues you have.

Här är en skärmdump:

This is a weird form of review spam attacks on businesses and I hope Google can build automated mechanisms to deal with these attacks going forward.

Note, Google disallows you to use their Generative AI for spam producing purposes, so does OpenAI I believe.

Forumdiskussion kl Local Search Forum.

With all the talk about ChatGPT and other AI bots, did you know that there is an OpenAI ChatGPT bot and it respects the robots.txt protocol? So if you want, you can block OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot from crawling, indexing and using your content and data from your website. This will block the ChatGPT plugins specifically.

Mike King spotted this and posted about it on Twitter, you can see the official documentation här. It reads:

ChatGPT-User is used by plugins in ChatGPT. This user-agent will only be used to take direct actions on behalf of ChatGPT users and is not used for crawling the web in any automatic fashion.

User agent token: ChatGPT-User
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
To allow plugins to access your site you can explicitly add the ChatGPT-User to your site’s robots.txt:

Here is a screenshot of the document, in case it changes in the future:

Again, if you don’t want OpenAI to use your site’s data for its AI and ChatGPT, you can disallow it in your robots.txt file. Although, I am not sure how real-time this is and if once OpenAI consumed the content, will it then remove it after-the-fact?

Forumdiskussion kl Twitter.

Google may be showing less site names and brand names in the title of the search results snippet. Yes, Google has a sitename and favicon change for the search results, so maybe Google is less likely to repeat the site name in the title of the search result snippet because of that new search result layout design?

Google may be showing fewer site names and brand names in the title of the search results snippet. I received a couple of complaints about this and now the Screaming Frog team also noticed it. So I think this is legit and maybe it will stick, maybe it won’t but SEOs and site owners are noticing the lack of site names in the title of the snippet.

For example, search for Air Jordan shoes return Nike.com and as you can see from the snippet, it just says “Jordan Shoes” in the title. Yes, the favicon and site name are above, but the title tag says “Jordan Shoes. Nike.com” but Google just shows “Jordan Shoes” in the snippet.

Similar with this American Airline snippet, it shows “Find New York to Miami flights” but the title tag says “American Airlines® – Find New York to Miami flights.”

Here is what Screaming Frog posted:

Looks like over the last week, Google has started showing less brand names at the end of SERP titles. Makes sense with site names already. pic.twitter.com/blh0d4Thd4

— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) March 28, 2023

The logic makes sense:

Yup, not really needed as much with site names!

— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) March 28, 2023

John Mueller thinks that is why:

Isn’t this just a side-effect of showing the site name a line above the title? https://t.co/v1RMUGoPyK

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) March 28, 2023

In any event, this may be happening intentionally and SEOs are noticing.

Forumdiskussion kl Twitter.