An online tutorial hub for Microsoft Excel has become the latest casualty of a brazen scheme in which a rival used artificial intelligence to clone hundreds of its articles, siphon off millions of page views, and publish error-laden copy that misleads readers. The incident, which the perpetrator openly detailed on social media, underscores how generative AI tools are being weaponized to game search rankings and erode trust in the web's information ecosystem.
David Bruns, the owner of Exceljet, noticed a steady decline in his site's traffic beginning last year. By this fall, he identified the cause: a content strategist named Jake Ward had fed roughly 1,800 Exceljet URLs into an AI article generator called Byword, which produced near-identical articles optimized for search engines. Ward then published these machine-written pieces on his own site, capturing clicks that would otherwise have gone to Exceljet.
In a since-deleted thread on X, Ward boasted of the operation, claiming it "stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor" and that he received 489,509 visits in October alone. He defended the tactic, arguing that "something acceptable, if done once, suddenly becomes unethical when reproduced at scale"—a stance that critics say reflects a broader disregard for the quality and accuracy of online information.
Bruns, who has spent years building Exceljet's reputation as a reliable resource for Excel users, expressed dismay at being outranked by content that no human had reviewed. "It's one thing to get outranked by an article that is arguably better than the article that you wrote, but it's something else to get outranked by an article that was written by a machine that no human ever reviewed," he told Business Insider. "It's just wrong to make money on that."
The impact extends beyond lost revenue. Bruns found that many of Ward's AI-generated articles contained blatant factual errors—in one case, describing an Excel feature that does not exist. "I started to look at the quality of the articles and realized that we're losing traffic to stuff that doesn't even make sense," he said.
Why Search Engines Are Vulnerable
The incident highlights a growing problem for search engines like Google, which rely on algorithms to surface relevant, trustworthy content. Search engine optimization (SEO) has long been a cat-and-mouse game, but generative AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to producing mass quantities of keyword-stuffed articles that can rank highly despite lacking substance or accuracy. As Bruns noted, when such articles appear at the top of search results, they gain an air of legitimacy, even when they are riddled with mistakes.
"This is a big problem for Google," Bruns said. "If people keep finding crappy articles at the top of the search results, they're going to end up questioning whether Google's doing a good job, but the fact that the articles are near or they can be at the top of the result makes it seem like they're legitimate."
The case has sparked discussions among webmasters and digital publishers about the need for stronger safeguards against AI-driven content theft. Some have called for search engines to penalize sites that publish unedited machine-generated copy, while others argue that platforms like Byword should implement stricter usage policies. For now, Bruns is left to contend with the fallout, even as he continues to produce original tutorials for his readers.
