In May, we reported that Google Search algorithms lowered the rankings of deepfake sites. Now, Google has gone into more detail on how this algorithm works and how you can manually remove deepfakes from Google Search.
Deepfake Search Ranking Updates
Emma Higham, Product Manager at Google said the search company made “updates to our ranking systems to keep this type of content from appearing high up in Search results.” Plus, Google also made it easier to remove deepfakes from Google Search.
Emma Higham wrote, “we are updating our ranking systems for queries where there’s a higher risk of explicit fake content appearing in Search.” I mean, it looked like they updated it in May of this year but it seems they made more improvements.
One deepfakes site named Mrdeepfakes.com showed in May an showed a 11% drop in search visible in Google from April to May 2024. But now when I look, it looks more like a 40% drop in search visibility.
Here is the Semrush chart:
Google made a couple of changes to its algorithms around this:
(1) Promote News over deepfakes: Google said they pushed out “ranking updates that will lower explicit fake content for many searches.” The example Google gave was “for queries that are specifically seeking this content and include people’s names, we’ll aim to surface high-quality, non-explicit content — like relevant news articles — when it’s available.” Google said these “updates we’ve made this year have reduced exposure to explicit image results on these types of queries by over 70%.”
(2) Deepfakes versus real consensual nude: Google said, “There’s also a need to distinguish explicit content that’s real and consensual (like an actor’s nude scenes) from explicit fake content (like deepfakes featuring said actor).”
