Fake news stories have been viewed tens of millions of times this week on Google’s Discover news aggregation platform.
Google promoted the fake stories despite the fact they came from publishers who had emerged from nowhere overnight.
The US search giant will still have made money from the articles (every sixth article on the Discover feed is a sponsored post with all revenue going to Google).
And the posts will have made tens of thousands in revenue for the creators of the fraudulent websites promoted by Google, which are packed with advertising.
The stories, with headlines such as, ‘Goodbye to Retiring at 67 – UK Government Officially Announces New State Pension Age’, have been among the top-performing stories on Discover in the UK.
One, headlined: “Driving Licence Update: New Rules for Over-62s Starting 22 September 2025”, is estimated to have been viewed 41 million times on Discover while two other false stories about the UK Government raising the pension age are believed to have racked up more than 10 million views.
The same incorrect information is has also appeared Google’s AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results.
Malcolm Coles, a consultant who helps publishers with their audience growth, spotted the fake stories using software tools Marfeel and Newzdash which analyse stories ranking in Google Discover.
Google Discover recommends content to users on Android devices and in Google apps, based on their searches and activities in other apps, and works like an automated news feed, without human oversight.
For publishers in the UK, Discover has become an increasingly important source of traffic, as traffic from Google search has declined, with Reach describing Discover as the “biggest referrer” of traffic in late 2024.
Coles told Press Gazette that he looked at the top-ranking stories on Discover and realised: “This is absolutely stuffed full of headlines that are alarming but aren’t factually accurate. Tied to sort of life and financial decisions and the sort of things people worry about.
“If Google’s going to recommend content to people, it has a responsibility to make sure that what it’s recommending is correct and trustworthy and authoritative and all the words Google uses. This is a massive fail.
“There are a couple of tools that offer some insight into Discover visibility – Marfeel and Newzdash. They aren’t perfect (due to the personalisation of Google Discover), but I’ve not known them to exaggerate the reach of posts, especially not to the scale of suggesting 40 million people have been shown something.
“If you take it at face value, more than half the UK have been shown this story. I’ve seen fake stories before, but never ones quite so egregious.”
Stories relating to changes in pension rules have become a viral staple for many news publishers in the UK, and this is why the spammers targeted this subject, Coles believes.
Coles said: “They know people click it a lot. It’s directly related to people’s lives – pension age, driving licence renewal. They gain ad revenue from it: millions of page views works out to a fair chunk of ad money.
“Google needs better quality standards – they should not be promoting URLs from brand new domains with factually inaccurate content. They talk a lot about quality, expertise, authority, trust – they need to live up to those standards.”
Coles said he worries about the impact of such content on publishers, saying: “If the feed is full of rubbish, there’s less space for genuine content and less money for publishers.
A Google spokesperson said: “Our spam-fighting systems aggressively fight mass-produced, low-quality content, keeping the vast majority out of Discover and keeping Search 99% spam-free.
“We have clear policies against content created for the primary purpose of manipulating Search and Discover and we take action against sites as appropriate.”
Google said its spam policies constantly evolve, including to take action against content generated by AI, or by a combination of AI and human efforts.
In France, it has become common for “black hat” SEO professionals to target the Google Discover feed with fake sites, many spewing AI-generated content, in an effort to earn money.
Many of these sites produce completely false news stories, similar to those seen in Britain this week, which are recommended by Google Discover – including suggestions that banknotes would cease to exist in France from October 2025, that grandparents would no longer be able to transfer money to their grandchildren, and that the Government would remove money from savings accounts to finance the war in Ukraine.
Jean-Marc Manach, a French journalist who has been tracing AI-generated news sites since 2024, said that he believes French editors may be targeting the Discover news feed in Britain: “Some editors don’t hesitate to publish blatantly fake news to attract some views.”
Fake news generated by sites has also been picked up and amplified by human journalists in France on other sites, such as a story that cars over ten years old would soon be subject to an annual technical inspection.
Manach said in a recent report by Nieman Lab highlighting dormant news sites taken over by AI slop publishers, that all the sites were run by French or French-speaking editors.
He said: “The French market is so overcrowded that some of them begin to target other countries.”
Manach sqaid: “Dozens of those editors try to ‘pop’ on Discover, as it’s a cash machine which lets them hope to earn thousands of bucks per day in advertising revenues.”
Earlier this year, Manach’s research found that more than 75 AI-generated news sites had been highlighted by Google Discover in France and 15 appeared in its top 50 news sites, with several achieving this for multiple months in a row.
The post Google promotes fake content to millions on Discover news platform appeared first on Press Gazette.
