For example, Google reduced our headline \u201cI used the \u2018cheat on everything\u2019 AI tool and it didn\u2019t help me cheat on anything<\/a>\u201d to just five words: \u201c\u2018Cheat on everything\u2019 AI tool.\u201d It almost sounds like we\u2019re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.<\/p>\n What we are seeing is a \u201csmall\u201d and \u201cnarrow\u201d experiment, one that\u2019s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how \u201csmall\u201d that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results \u2014 headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it\u2019s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.<\/p>\n Like I wrote in January, when Google decided it wouldn\u2019t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover<\/a> from The Verge and our competitors, this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don\u2019t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.<\/p>\n (Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge\u2019s parent company, has filed a lawsuit against Google<\/a>, seeking damages from its illegal ad tech monopoly.)<\/p>\n The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they\u2019re not yet the kind of tripe we\u2019ve seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode<\/a> instead.)<\/p>\n Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines<\/a> like \u201cUS reverses foreign drone ban\u201d \u2014 on a story reporting the opposite \u2014 the nonsense headlines we\u2019re seeing in Google Search are downright tame:<\/p>\n I\u2019m particularly annoyed by \u201cCopilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again,\u201d as I hate reading Headlines That Cap Every Word and we never do that at The Verge. Images: Google<\/p>\n But these are just the first headlines we\u2019ve seen Google change. They may be the canary in the coal mine. Google may alter the deal even further.<\/p>\n While Google says this is an \u201cexperiment,\u201d you shouldn\u2019t assume that means the company won\u2019t roll it out more widely, because Google originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature, one that \u201cperforms well for user satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n Google did not explain why the company is no longer respecting the headline identifiers it has long encouraged newsrooms to use. The company did answer some specific questions via email, though.<\/p>\n Google told us that the overall idea is to \u201cidentify content on a page that would be a useful and relevant title to a users\u2019 query.\u201d The goal is \u201cbetter matching titles to users\u2019 queries and facilitating engagement with web content,\u201d according to Kutz.<\/p>\n This test is \u201cnot specific to news publications, but looking at how we can improve titles horizontally,\u201d according to Adriance. Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that \u201cif we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI,\u201d according to De Leon. Google did not explain how it might replace our story titles without generative AI.<\/p>\n Mostly, Google\u2019s answers tried to normalize the idea of replacing headlines in search \u2014 suggesting that this is just one of the \u201ctens of thousands of live traffic experiments\u201d<\/a> that Google runs to test possible improvements to Google Search, and reminding us that it\u2019s already been tweaking the titles of webpages in Search to help users<\/a> for many years now.<\/p>\n But I want to be clear: This is not normal. I\u2019ve edited tech news for 15 years, paying close attention to SEO, and I\u2019ve never before seen Google overwrite a headline in search results with something it created itself.<\/p>\n The changes that Google typically makes to a news story\u2019s title are far simpler. If Google\u2019s algorithms decide a headline is too long or lopsided, it\u2019ll sometimes show you only part of that headline, lopping off the beginning or end. Here are two recent examples of that:<\/p>\n Or, if a story has two headlines, one that we flag as the \u201csearch headline\u201d and one that we flag as the \u201con-page headline,\u201d Google will sometimes display the on-page headline instead of the one we crafted for a more general search audience. (We currently set those headlines inside WordPress, the popular content management platform behind many leading websites, but I\u2019ve used those fields inside other backends too.) This tendency of Google Search has been annoying over the years, but nowhere near as annoying as an AI creating \u201cCopilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again\u201d out of whole cloth.<\/p>\n Changing headlines, and their meaning, makes journalism less trustworthy at a time when powerful institutions are trying to discredit it, and when many news organizations are struggling just to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve<\/a> warned<\/a> for years<\/a> that Google is prioritizing AI search over the \u201c10 blue links,\u201d and I am frequently frustrated that its Gemini AI search doesn\u2019t encourage clicking through to actual news sources. But I figured that I could always fall back<\/a> to those blue links to get a relatively unadulterated experience. 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