Google enshittified the internet

https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/monotonous-web/

Why do recipes at the top of Google all - before the actual recipe you came for - have a huge ramble of 4 paragraphs, 3 ads, 2 pictures, and a partridge and a pear tree?

Because SEO is a game where the early winners determine the mysterious dogshit-shaped cookie cutter that all the other recipes need to gore themselves to fit inside. And so long as a search engine awards the top places to content that looks the same as content already at the top - rather than say, having "top results" alongside "niche results" - we will watch every form of content slowly enshittify itself to conform to the status quo.

If you want to chiefly blame one thing for content on the internet becoming shittier over time (even before AI), blame Google.