1 HN user recommended this commentary1 month2026score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN cites it as a firsthand example of search engines rewarding AI-flavored content over genuine writing.
Louis Rossmann explains how Google delisted his repair business site for almost a year, and how having AI rewrite his authentic content into corporate-style text finally restored his rankings.
“where he had Gemini replace his 10+ year carefully curated content with AI slop and he instantly shot (back) up to the top of the rankings.” (HN, 2026)
1 recommendations · 4 citations · Commentary · news from the time
he explained why he does that. In short, he was fighting to be displayed in search results by having legitimate content on the site for months, but the traffic was dying day by day and killing his business. He then asked Gemini to write him some bullshit SEO and went back to the 1st spot on google. Look for the video on his channel, it's not as bad as it looks. [this video] I found this but keep in mind there were more videos about it. Let me leave the description of the video here: Google delisted my business for almost a year. Professional SEO couldn't fix it, creating a new site didnt help. What finally worked was having AI rewrite my authentic content into corporate-friendly bunk. I hate that it worked. This video took me a month to make because I felt ashamed of my decision.
Explains why Rossmann used AI-written SEO content on his site.
Look at the world Google is molding. Here's a guy who has had an online business dependent on ranking well in organic searches for ~20 years and has 2.5 million subs on YouTube. Traffic to his site was fine to sustain his business this whole time up until about 2-3 years where AI took over search results and stopped ranking his site. He used Google's AI to rewrite a bunch of his articles to make them more friendly towards what ranks nowadays and he went from being ghosted to being back on the top of the first page of results. He told his story here [this video] . NOTE: I've never seen him in my YouTube feed until the other day but it resonated a lot with me because I have a technical blog for 11 years and was able to sustain an online business for a decade until the last 2 years or so. Traffic to my site nose dived. This translates to a very satisfying lifestyle business to almost $0. I haven't gone down the path of rewriting all of my posts with AI to remove my personality yet. Search engines want you to remove your personal take on things and write in a very machine oriented / keyword stuffed way.
Rossmann's story of AI rewriting restoring his search ranking.
Louis Rossman recently posted a video ( [this video] ) where he had Gemini replace his 10+ year carefully curated content with AI slop and he instantly shot (back) up to the top of the rankings. They're very clearly favoring their own generated generic content rather than any sort of organic, well written or well informed entries. Shame.
Gemini-rewritten content put his site back at top of rankings.
That’s an LLM generated website if I’ve ever seen one the explanation for that is here [this video] basically louis found that not using AI to design his website drastically reduced the hits he would get from google.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more