Thousands of families have witnessed Google search results filled with fake obituaries of their loved ones. The edge As reported in February, the obituaries, which often appear ai-generated, are aimed at ordinary people, not just celebrities, and are written to extract clicks and subsequent advertising revenue from readers.
One of the sites that the Check My Ads report focused on is HausaNew.com.ng, a content factory that, until recently, was Producing obituaries and news about local deaths in cities across the United States. The site posted an impersonal, clickbait obituary for Harrison Sylver, 20, who died by suicide earlier this year. Sylver’s mother, Nancy Arnold, told Check My Ads she discovered dozens of similar sites with fake obituaries, including some that reported inaccurate details about where her son grew up, what his hobbies were, and how he died. HausaNew.com.ng now redirects to a “Canada Travels” homepage filled with random job listings, and a search for Sylver’s obituary yields no results.
Like other obituary content mills, the website makes money by hosting digital ads on its website – the sites typically earn a few cents each time someone visits their pages or clicks on an ad.
Another obituary site identified by Check My Ads, SarkariExam.com, did not publish a story about Sylver's death, but flooded the web with poorly written and inaccurate obituaries of other people, such as The edge It was previously reported. The site has been running ads alongside that content, ultimately making it profitable. Using the well-known.dev website, Check My Ads cross-referenced SarkariExam.com and ad exchanges to see which advertising companies appeared to be placing ads on the site (because the information on well-known.dev is self-reported, there is a chance it is out of date, the report warns). Obituary articles that previously appeared on SarkariExam.com appear to be inaccessible.
One of the advertising firms, TripleLift, acknowledged to Check My Ads that its clients’ ads were appearing on SarkariExam.com and said it had opened an internal investigation. Ryan Levitt, vice president of communications at TripleLift, told Check My Ads that the firm plans to update its terms to make it clear that ai-powered obituary spam is prohibited. SarkariExam.com earned about $100 through TripleLift over the past two years, the firm told Check My Ads. Other ad exchanges, such as ad tech firm Teads, did not respond to Check My Ads’ findings. Teads has just been acquired for $1 billion.
Google has said it will work to decrease the visibility of obituary spam sites, but Check My Ad’s report suggests the search engine company has profited from that very content: HausaNew.com.ng, which published an obituary about Sylver, appears to have had ads on the site that are served by Google.
“We have reviewed the examples you shared and have taken appropriate action. When we find content that violates our publisher policies, we take action and remove the ads from the publication. We enforce our policies at both the page and site level,” a Google spokesperson told Check My Ads.
