Ads for blue-chip brands are being served on ‘unreliable’ AI-generated sites, report says

Ads for big brands are showing up on “low-quality AI-generated sites” and are primarily served by Google Ads, according to a new report from the publisher-rating tool Newsguard.

In May and June 2023, ads from 141 brands appeared on 55 AI-generated websites, NewsGuard found. According to the report, analysts examined 217 websites categorized by NewsGuard as “unreliable AI-generated news” and identified 393 programmatic ads from major brands on 55 sites with content that it described as “low-quality or apparently plagiarized.”

Google Ads served 356 of the 393 ads NewsGuard reviewed, or more than 90%, analysts found. While NewsGuard did not identify the blue-chip brands whose ads analysts observed on these websites, the company did reach out to 40 of those brands (of the four that responded, all declined to comment), as well as Google, which had not returned requests for comment by the time of the report’s publication.

Big fish: According to Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, the report is focused on larger companies instead of smaller businesses, which “probably aren’t paying for any brand safety protection,” he said.

“In the case of these large companies with significant revenue and therefore, most likely, significant marketing teams and marketing budgets, they’re already paying for technology that is allegedly supposed to protect them from appearing on these kinds of sites, and it’s not working,” he said.

A bigger problem? Skibinski said the report “almost certainly understates the scale of this problem.” And as AI tools grow in popularity, efforts to prevent ads from appearing alongside this kind of content are just getting started, Skibinski said.

“We’re probably still in the first inning of this problem, in the sense that generative AI is a relatively new technology,” Skibinski said. “We expect that the publishers are going to get more and more sophisticated as this technology becomes more widespread and people become more familiar with it.”