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

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.