Webspam
Webspam is content or links made to trick search engines into ranking pages higher than they deserve, at readers' expense.
Webspam is anything made to trick search engines into ranking a page higher than it deserves. Stuffed keywords, hidden text, pages that show bots one thing and people another, bought links, hacked pages and floods of low-effort articles are all webspam. Google uses the word for the whole area its spam teams and systems fight.
It matters to a marketer for two reasons. Doing it can get your site demoted or dropped. And other people's spam crowds the results you're trying to win.
What counts
Google lists what it treats as spam in its spam policies. The list grows as tactics change. Recent additions include publishing lots of low-value pages at scale, often with AI, and renting space on a respected site to rank pages that have nothing to do with it.
Google catches most spam automatically. For the rest, its staff can apply a manual action, which you'll see in Search Console along with what it's for.
For example, a competitor publishes 2,000 pages called "best coffee shop in" followed by every town in the UK, each with the same text. Google's systems are built to spot pages like these. Kestrel Roasters, with one honest page per real shop, has nothing to copy and nothing to fear.
Webspam aimed at AI answers
Spam has followed people to AI search. Some pages are written to be quoted by AI platforms: fake comparison pages that always crown the same brand, planted forum posts, or hidden text with instructions meant for a model. AI platforms and search engines are working to filter these out, and a brand caught doing it loses the trust it wanted.
If spam spreads something false about you, the first step is knowing what the answers say.
In AnswerOrbit
Claims checks what every answer says about you against your facts, and shows you the sentence when an answer contradicts one, with the pages behind it. Recommendations can then suggest asking a site to correct what it says, or reporting answers that repeat a wrong claim to the platform.