Google manages to reduce ‘deepfake’ pornography in search results, according to Similarweb

May 17. (Portaltic/EP) –

Google has managed to reduce content related to ‘deepfake’ pornography from its search engine results, something that is demonstrated by a “precipitous” drop in search traffic on the two most popular websites that contain this type of videos and manipulated images. , according to data from Similarweb.

Earlier this month, the company announced an update to its Inappropriate Content Policy in Google Ads to expressly prohibit ads that promote services aimed at creating pornographic content through ‘deepfake’.

Google then said that it would begin to apply this update to its policies on May 30, commenting that among the pages it would ban would be those that offered “instructions on how to create” these types of images.

According to data from Bloomberg, The Google search engine has been the main driver of traffic to web pages with ‘deepfake’ content. So much so that, by mid-2023, the search engine represented almost half of the desktop traffic of the most visited ‘deepfakes’ website, Mrdeepfakes.com, which received 12 million visits in November of that year.

Despite this data, the firm would have managed to reduce synthetic content altered or generated to be sexually explicit or contain nudity from its Search Results, as confirmed by a spokesperson.

In statements reported by Bloomberg, this person commented that Google “has been actively developing new protections in the search engine to help people affected” by deepfake and that continues to “reduce the visibility of involuntary synthetic pornography and develop more safeguards as this situation evolves.”

This would have resulted in a “plummeting” US search traffic for the two major deepfake porn websites, according to data provided by Similarweb, which has analyzed all search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo.

This website analysis tool has noted that search traffic on Mrdeepfakes.com was 21 percent lower in the first 10 days of May compared to the average for the previous six months.

Likewise, Similarweb has noted that searches for the second most popular ‘deepfake’ pornography site in this country, whose name it has not revealed, fell 25 percent in this time.