Google Search knowledge panels sometimes show that it was written by Google itself. I guess Google uses AI or machine learning to write these knowledge panels. There are many examples of Google citing itself for some knowledge panels.
If you search for some of your favorite cities like [new york] or [london] you will see Google written knowledge panels that no longer link to Wikipedia.
They are not the best written pieces of content but who am I to judge.
Bill Neto posted about this on Twitter and said "I just noticed that Google wrote the description in the knowledge panel about London, instead of extracting it from wikipedia. It's the first time I'm noticing this." I do not think this is new but it is recent...
Yep. Danny Sullivan from Google said it was not new:
It's not new. Some knowledge panels have descriptions by human writers at Google, as this page explains: https://t.co/CDWM5RiJtn
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 21, 2022
It's been like this since at least 2018, but the -Google attribution was added in 2020.
You can go to that Twitter thread and see the complaints about some of these ML generated knowledge panels.
I do wonder how much Wikipedia is impacted by Google not linking to them here?
This seems to not be impacting that much the traffic that the wikipedia page for London receives, if at all.
— Bill Neto (@BillVazNeto) April 21, 2022
Source: https://t.co/WYqV5dhAHf pic.twitter.com/9q0HQdeLXp
Here is more from Danny on this:
The -Google part is attribution indicating we wrote the description. See also: https://t.co/55xDApET0S
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 21, 2022
Yes, other sites sometimes scrape these. See also:https://t.co/y1lfevttzD
Forum discussion at Twitter.