From Newsgroup: comp.misc
Google AI Recipe Extinction Event
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AI Mode is mangling recipes by merging instructions from multiple creators–-and causing them huge dips in ad traffic.
Aimee Levitt
Mon 15 Dec 2025 10.00 EST
This past March, when Google began rolling out its AI Mode search
capability, it began offering AI-generated recipes. The recipes were
not all that intelligent. The AI had taken elements of similar
recipes from multiple creators and Frankensteined them into something
barely recognizable. In one memorable case, the Google AI failed to
distinguish the satirical website the Onion from legitimate recipe
sites and advised users to cook with non-toxic glue.
Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites
behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested
recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form,
in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their
recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on
Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to
an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile,
are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to
this digital slop.
Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are
not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded
work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply
to the particular wording of those instructions).
Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by
offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now
they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social
media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI
slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether.
"There are a lot of people that are scared to even talk about what's
going on because it is their livelihood," says Jim Delmage who, with
his wife, Tara, runs the blog and YouTube channel Sip and Feast.
Matt Rodbard, the founder and editor-in-chief of the website Taste,
is even more pessimistic. Taste used to publish recipes more
frequently, but now it mostly focuses on journalism and a podcast
(which Rodbard hosts). "For websites that depend on the advertising
model," he says, "I think this is an extinction event in many ways."
The holiday season is traditionally when food bloggers earn most of
their ad revenue. For many, this year has been slower than usual. One
blogger, Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen, told Bloomberg that
in the past two years, she has lost 80% of her traffic.
Others, like Delmage and Karen Tedesco, the author of the blog
Familystyle Food, say their numbers, and ad revenue, have remained
steady--so far. They attribute this to focusing their energies less
on trying to game the search engines than on the long-term goal of
attracting regular followers--and, in Delmage's case, viewers.
Tedesco's strategy has been to create recipes that rely on her
experience and technical knowhow honed by years in restaurant
kitchens and as a personal chef. Her Italian meatball recipe, for
example, based on her mother's, includes advice about which meat to
use, an explanation of why milk-soaked breadcrumbs are essential for
texture, and a dozen process photos and a video.
But she is still worried about the potential impact of AI. When she
recently did a Google search for "Italian meatballs", Familystyle
Food appeared as the top result. Then she switched to AI Mode. There,
she found the recipe had been Frankensteined--or "synthesized" as
Gemini put it--into a new recipe with nine other sources (including
Sip and Feast and a Washington Post recipe for Greek meatballs). The AI-generated recipe was little more than a list of ingredients and
six basic steps with none of the details that make Tedesco's recipe
unique.
AI Mode linked to all 10 recipes, including Tedesco's, but, she says,
"I don't think many people are actually clicking on the source links.
At this point, they're absolutely trusting in the results that are
getting thrown in their faces."
Other bloggers have seen a more definite impact on their viewership.
Adam Gallagher, who runs Inspired Taste with his wife, Joanne, and
who has become an outspoken critic of AI on social media, told the
podcast Marketing O'Clock that since spring, he has noticed that
while the number of times viewers saw links to the site on Google has increased, the number of actual site visitors has decreased. This
indicates, to him, that users are satisfied with the search engine's
AI interpretation of Inspired Taste's recipes.
After the Gallaghers posted about the discrepancy on X and Instagram,
a number of readers replied to say they had not realized there was a
difference between the recipes on the blog and the version that
showed up in Google searches. Perhaps they had also appreciated the
convenience of not having to click on another website, especially
when Google's page design was so clean and uncluttered.
Rodbard acknowledges that many food blogs have gotten ugly and
overloaded with ads, which has exacerbated the problem. "Ad tech on
these recipe blogs has gotten so bad, so many pop-up windows and so
much crashing, we kind of lost as publishers," he says.
According to Tom Critchlow, the EVP of audience growth at Raptive, a
media company that works with many food bloggers to find advertisers,
it isn't ads that are driving viewers away. It's Google itself, with
its changes to the algorithm and now with AI Mode, that's making the
sites harder to find.
There is some hope though: a survey of 3,000 US adults commissioned
by Raptive showed that the more interaction people had with AI, the
less they wanted to engage with it, and nearly half the respondents
rated AI content less trustworthy than content made by a human.
But unless the public rebels against AI Mode, there is only so much
bloggers can do. They can block OpenAI's training crawler, which
gathers information that ChatGPT uses to create content, including
its own recipe generator, but theyare not necessarily willing to make themselves invisible to web searches; as Delmage puts it: "You can't
bite the hand that feeds you."
There is also the option of moving over to a subscription model, such
as Substack or Patreon, and keeping the recipes behind a paywall, but
both Tedesco and Delmage point out that the most successful
Substackers, like Caroline Chambers or David Lebovitz, came to the
platform with much more substantial followings than they have. "If I
were to give up my website or even try to go over to Substack, I
would be broke," Tedesco says.
Rodbard suggests that the analog version of the recipe blog, the
cookbook, might be due for a comeback. Cookbooks, after all, offer
the same experience of spending time and learning from a trusted
source, and it's likely the recipes have been tested. As a bonus,
unlike phones or laptops, they don't go dark when you neglect them
for too long and you can splash tomato sauce on them without
inflicting permanent damage. According to the market research firm
Circana (formerly BookScan), sales of baking cookbooks are up 80%
this year, but other areas have been relatively flat.
But AI bots are stealing from published cookbooks, too. When Meta was
training its own AI, it compiled thousands of books into a dataset
called Library Genesis (LibGen). Now unscrupulous publishers have
raided LibGen and repackaged some of the books into dupes, which they
are selling on Amazon.
As more people become aware of the amount of AI slop on the internet
and how to identify it, Critchlow believes they will develop a
greater appreciation for content produced by humans. "People will
ultimately place a higher premium on being able to know that these
recipes have been tested and made by somebody that I follow or
somebody I respect or somebody that I like," he says.
The recipe creators themselves are not so sure. "I'm putting my faith
in that there's always going to be a segment of people who really
want to learn something," Tedesco says. But as for the business of
blogging itself, "it's like a rolling tide. It's always up and down
and you have to roll with it and adapt."
From: <
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/15/ google-ai-recipes-food-bloggers>
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