From i Google results show fewer tweets, due to policy change Twitter which imposes a daily limit of readable posts per day. The decision, taken to prevent researchers from training artificial intelligence on user tweets, also limits Google’s analysis, which therefore does not highlight tweets in the results.
Tweets appear less on Google after Twitter policy change
According to a statement released to The Verge, Google has been experiencing difficulties effectively displaying tweets and Twitter pages in search results. Spokeswoman Lara Levin said: “We understand that our ability to index Twitter.com has been limited, compromising our ability to show tweets and site pages in search results. Websites have control over crawler access to their content.”
Over the past few days, Twitter has made significant changes to the visibility of tweets on its site. Friday, it started prevent unregistered users from browsing tweetswhile Saturday introduced limits “temporary” to the number of tweets people can read in a day. And this also impacted Google’s crawl of Twitter.
Search Engine Land compared Twitter URLs indexed in Google search between Friday and Monday, and the results clearly indicate a change. On Friday, 471 million results were indexed with the “site:twitter.com” search operator, while on Monday that number it dropped to 180 million.
Twitter has characterized these imposed limits as temporary, suggesting that it is working on a solution for prevent AI scraping. But for now, this limitation affects everyone – including Google. And it also implies a decrease in human users reading tweets: something advertisers and users may not be happy about.