Media · Opinion
Brown Brothers Media bought old news sites because Google still ranks the past
The AI slop at Space Daily and VegOut is cheap and replaceable. The expensive asset was decades of domain trust that Google lets a new owner inherit, and that loophole deserves the outrage.
A Space Daily article bylined by its editor-in-chief, Lachlan Brown, opened with the sentence “Now I have all the verified sources I need.” Futurism found it in its investigation of Brown Brothers Media. The chatbot had left its working notes in the published copy, on a space news site that has been running for more than three decades and that Similarweb estimates pulled about 10 million page views a month over the past year.
I expected this to be a story about AI writing. After reading it twice, I think it is a story about what Google pays for. The text is worth close to nothing. Futurism ran 30 recent BBM articles through the Pangram detector and all 30 came back as 100 percent AI-generated. One real person’s byline appeared on at least 85 articles in a single week, more than 90,000 words. You can generate it on a laptop in Saigon for the price of an API key.
What BBM paid for was old domains with years of Google traffic behind them. Its portfolio went from fewer than a dozen sites in 2023 to at least 24 in 2025, and it kept buying in 2026. Over the same period, according to an internal spreadsheet Futurism obtained, its writer roster fell from upwards of 60 in December 2023 to 12 in December 2024. Gisele Navarro of HouseFresh points out that many of the acquisitions had domains registered in the 90s or the early 00s. BBM’s own press release credited its audience to organic reach through Google Discover and search. Similarweb puts the network at 64.7 million visits a month, which Futurism says would sit it just behind the Washington Post, run by about a dozen people.
The mechanism is simple. A site accumulates links, a place in Google News and Discover, and years of signals that readers trusted it. Those signals attach to the hostname. When the founder sells, as Maggie Ortlieb did with VegOut after running it for about ten years, the trust transfers with the DNS records, and Google’s systems have no obvious reason to notice that the food reviews have become loneliness essays about retired schoolteachers.
Google’s rulebook has a gap exactly this shape. The March 2024 update added three spam policies. Expired domain abuse is defined around a domain that has lapsed and been bought and repurposed; BBM bought live sites from owners who chose to sell. Site reputation abuse targets third-party content riding on a host’s reputation, and here the new owner is the first party. That leaves scaled content abuse, which Navarro says this plainly is, and which, as far as I can find, depends heavily on someone at Google deciding to look. As of late November 2024 the site reputation policy was still enforced only by manual action.
Google would say it is winning. After the March 2024 core update, a spokesperson claimed 45 percent less low-quality, unoriginal content in results, beating its own 40 percent target, and Google told Futurism it keeps 99 percent of Search visits spam-free. It also deindexed VegOut and Silicon Canals after Futurism sent questions. I read those facts the other way. Both percentages are Google marking its own homework, with no method published. The deindexing came after a reporter spent months on the case, and within weeks the sites were back in results. A dozen people producing 90,000 words a week under a single byline will outrun any process that waits for a journalist to file.
The fix I would want is mechanical. A change of control on a domain, followed by a jump in publishing volume and a swerve in topic, should strip the inherited trust until the new owner earns it again. None of those signals is exotic: Futurism measured the volume and the topic swerve by hand. I suspect AI answer engines that lean on search indexes inherit the same bias, though I have seen nobody measure it, and someone should.
Type “Ann Druyan’s brainwaves” into Google. When Futurism checked, the top result was one of four near-identical BBM pieces about the Voyager records published weeks apart, part of more than 100 Voyager articles since May. If a Brown Brothers site is still first when you try it, you have a precise reading of what Google’s brief deindexing of VegOut and Silicon Canals cost them.
Prompted by How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month, Futurism.