Google Publishes Their 2021 Webspam Report and Talks About SpamBrain

Google said they caught 200 times more spam sites in 2021 compared to when they first started nearly two decades ago, thanks, in part, to their AI-based spam-prevention system called SpamBrain.

SpamBrain was launched in 2018 and we’ve been continuously improving its performance. In 2021, SpamBrain identified nearly six times more spam sites than in 2020. This resulted in a major reduction in hacked spam (70%), which was a spam type commonly observed in 2020, and gibberish spam on hosting platforms (75%). Another notable feature of SpamBrain is that it was built to be a robust and evolving platform to address all types of abuse.

With an increasing volume of sophisticated spam being produced every day, SpamBrain’s ability to identify disruptive and malicious behaviors among billions of web pages has allowed us to keep more than 99% of searches spam-free.