AI-generated recipe content is becoming prevalent online, including for Thanksgiving meals.

This year, established trends are shifting. Rather than directing home cooks to her decade-old, thoroughly vetted recipes, Google is more frequently presenting AI-generated overviews compiled from fragments of her contributions and those of others, which frequently contain fundamental errors. For example, an AI-constructed rendition of Gargano’s Christmas cake would instruct individuals to bake a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C).

“You’d end up with charcoal!” She said. Meanwhile, traffic to her turkey recipe is already down 40% year over year.

Recipe bloggers such as Gargano have noted that this marks the initial holiday period where individuals are beginning to place confidence in AI responses from search engines and chatbots, along with recipe material reconfigured by AI, which can be difficult to differentiate from authentic content. This situation is not only detrimental to commerce but could also be disastrous for a festive meal if home chefs, influenced by appealing AI-generated images, attempt recipes that prove unpalatable or violate scientific principles. In discussions, twenty-two independent culinary artists stated that AI-generated “recipe slop” is altering virtually every method by which people seek cooking guidance online, harming their livelihoods while leading consumers to squander both time and resources.

Online, authors report that their verified recipes are obscured by the overwhelming volume of content. Pinterest feeds are saturated with AI-created visuals of meals, and the accompanying directions will not yield the depicted results; Google’s AI Overviews present cooking instructions riddled with mistakes, which divert traffic from culinary experts. Concurrently, Facebook content operations employ AI-generated pictures of purportedly delectable yet unachievable meals to the forefront of users' feeds, aiming to convert any engagement into advertising income.

All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

The volume of visitors to food blogs can fluctuate significantly based on the specific subject matter, the online channel used, the readership, and even the time of year. However, low-quality AI-generated content is prevalent. Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack, who has been writing the Mexican cuisine blog Muy Bueno for 15 years, recently cautioned her over 190,000 Facebook followers. At the beginning of this month, she shared two images of tamales created by artificial intelligence: one depicted sauce drizzled over the corn husks, and a second showed tamales arranged horizontally in a steaming basket. She noted that both were clearly inaccurate.

The husks aren’t meant to be eaten; you remove them before adding sauce. And tamales should steam upright so the masa cooks evenly. “Little details like this are big red flags,” she told readers. “When you search for recipes, make sure they come from trusted human cooks who actually test their food.”

Last Christmas, the problem became personal when her spouse decided to attempt a Facebook recipe for maraschino cherry chocolate chip cookies, originating from a post that appeared to lack a human creator or origin. Marquez-Sharpnack expressed doubt regarding the images, where the cookies appeared excessively vibrant pink. However, her husband believed the post because “it was on Facebook.” The outcome was a flattened dough mass with an overly saccharine taste. “A disaster,” she stated.

Concurrently, Marquez-Sharpnack has observed her own images being utilized without authorization on Facebook, Pinterest, and even Etsy, where a vendor incorporated her culinary instructions into an electronic recipe collection. Given that the majority of her website visitors still originate from Google, she now implores her audience to confirm the authenticity of links they select: examine web addresses, seek out genuine “about” sites, and exercise caution with unbelievable or excessively polished visuals.

Etsy Inc. And Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., did not reply when asked for their thoughts. Pinterest Inc. Stated that the movement of creators to its platform can vary due to numerous factors, and it highlighted that its AI-powered creative tools are intended to enhance, rather than substitute, human ingenuity.

In a statement, Google said that “AI Overviews are often a helpful starting point to learn about a dish, but we see that people still want to go and read original recipes from creators. We’re focused on making it easy for people to discover and visit useful sites that have a good user experience.”

Carrie Forrest, the proprietor of Clean Eating Kitchen, has found AI to be ruinous, with 80% of her website's visitors and income vanishing over the past two years. She stated that while visitor numbers began to decline following the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT, the complete collapse of her traffic occurred after Google introduced its AI Mode in search. Consequently, she has had to dismiss her entire staff, reducing her workforce from approximately ten individuals to none. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

Forrest anticipates this holiday period will be her least busy in quite some time. She expresses concern that if additional content creators cease their work, AI might lack fresh material to utilize, aside from what AI itself produces. She stated it could reach a stage where “AI is just talking to itself,” and individuals preparing meals at home are taking chances with the outcomes. 

Online users might gravitate toward prompt, simple AI responses instead of websites partly due to food bloggers frequently embedding lengthy personal anecdotes, occasionally spanning numerous paragraphs, on their sites, compelling readers to scroll down before finding a recipe. This trend also emerged as a consequence of Google's algorithms: extended articles historically achieved better search engine rankings and provided more room for advertisements.

Food writers mentioned that Google continues to provide the majority of their website visitors, but this previously reliable stream now experiences erratic shifts that are difficult for them to comprehend or anticipate. These changes are also impacting the fundamental dissemination of culinary information across the web.

When using Google to look up Chinese culinary customs, a home cook might find the AI Overview adequate. However, this might pull from the The Woks of Life blog, which is an extensive English-language source for Chinese cuisine, as stated by Sarah Leung, one of its co-founders. She mentioned that her family has dedicated considerable time to developing informational content regarding methods, customs, and heritage. “AI summaries have almost completely overtaken results about various Chinese ingredients, many of which had no information online in English before individual creators like us wrote about them.”

This change prompts her to consider if releasing updated reference materials is even worthwhile. “In all likelihood, no one will ever discover those pages,” she stated.

Even their culinary demonstrations, which serve as the primary method for the family to impart Chinese methods, are frequently captured and condensed by Google’s AI Overviews. On one occasion, Google acknowledged their contributions prominently, yet Leung stated the broader concern persists: “How many people will actually click through to watch?” From Leung's perspective, the emergence of AI seems less like an innovative research instrument and more like a power that erodes the very foundations it relies upon, rendering the individuals who established that expertise progressively unseen.

Frequently, information within AI responses originates from multiple origins simultaneously, creating challenges with precision and proper credit. Adam Gallagher, who has managed Inspired Taste since 2009, refers to these as “Frankenstein AI recipes.” Google's AI draws from Inspired Taste's components and merges them with directions from other widely-read culinary websites, subsequently presenting this amalgamation as the solution preceding his own web address, even when individuals specifically look for his brand. His internal metrics indicated that following the introduction of AI Overviews for inquiries concerning cocktails from Inspired Taste, the rate of users clicking through to his website decreased by 30%.

In November, Google debuted an updated version of its artificial intelligence model which executives stated demonstrated a “massive jump” in logical deduction and programming skills. The recently developed model, Gemini 3, was promptly rolled out to all of Google’s primary services, such as search, and was capable of responding to inquiries with dynamic visuals.

However, for Gallagher, the declaration triggered significant concern. Following his experience with the updated Google Search, which now utilizes Gemini 3, he discovered that the interactive graphics output was, in fact, “mashing together our photos along with other publishers’ in their plagiarized AI recipes.”

“With this development, we are now going to have to start to let our followers and readers know what is going on so that they don’t follow these Google recipes,”  Gallagher said.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Marita Sinden, the originator of MyDinner, has dedicated over ten years to disseminating genuine German culinary traditions to a global readership. Similar to her fellow content creators, she's observed significant drops in online exposure: Google referral traffic has decreased by 30% in the current year, and Pinterest engagement has fallen by 50%. 

In her opinion, a significant transformation is occurring on Facebook, where algorithms frequently promote captivating AI-created food visuals over content from actual chefs. A substantial portion of her audience consists of older individuals, a demographic particularly susceptible to the appealing depictions of elaborate meals circulating on the site. She's even encountered instructional videos detailing methods to specifically target senior Facebook users with AI-generated imagery.

But even if Facebook users take the extra step to verify that the source of the information is real, they may find themselves on an AI-generated website. Some creators say AI systems are now being used to clone their library of work — lifting their photos, rewriting their recipes, and republishing the results as new “original” work. At least four bloggers told Bloomberg they’ve discovered AI-generated replicas of their recipes circulating under different domains, with the instructions lightly rephrased and the photos subtly altered by AI. Because the content isn’t an exact copy, traditional takedown tools like DMCA aren’t straightforward, leaving creators with almost no remedy even when the imitation is obvious.

This is what occurred with Bjork Ostrom, who co-founded the enduring culinary website Pinch of Yum. He recently uncovered what seemed to be an AI-created replica of his entire online presence — a German-language iteration filled with AI-modified versions of his culinary pictures and artificial, slightly altered depictions of his spouse and young offspring. 

“It was unsettling,” he said, describing the shock of scrolling through uncanny photos of his family on a site he had no connection to. The site makes it seem like the content is coming from a human, even though the recipes can no longer be trusted. 

Sometimes, copied recipes can outperform the originals. Coley Gaffney, a professionally trained chef who runs the blog Coley Cooks, said Pinterest has become “notoriously filled with AI slop,” with searches for her most popular dishes now dominated by machine-generated copies. One AI-run site is now capturing  the top pin for a search that previously reliably sent readers to her — using a recipe that she wrote. 

For The Food Blog, operated by Colleen Milne, there's been a significantly steeper decline in traffic from referrals. Previously, Pinterest was Milne's primary source of visitors after Google, contributing approximately one-quarter of her total readership. However, she stated this proportion has more than halved in the last twelve months, decreasing from approximately 25% to merely 11%. Her monthly views on Pinterest, which were once in the neighborhood of 1.3 million, have fallen to 419,000 and are still decreasing. “I have seen several of my recipes and photos copied by AI on Pinterest,”, she commented. “Pinterest has a ‘report pin’ button, but there’s no option for reporting AI copying.” 

Pinterest's prior recommendation emails featured seasonal recipes from human contributors; however, they now more frequently propose AI-created dishes, as noted by Stacie Vaughan, who manages Simply Stacie, an outlet dedicated to family-oriented cuisine. “It’s frustrating to see how much space this kind of content is taking up, especially during what used to be one of the busiest times of the year for food bloggers,” she stated. 

Pinterest stated that its AI-powered suggestions aid in linking creators to viewers and enhance the visibility of excellent material, such as culinary posts. The firm further mentioned that it provides users with management options and identifiers for AI-generated content, employs updated detection systems to mark images produced by AI even without associated data, and upholds its community standards along with its generative AI acceptable use guidelines for all content generated by artificial intelligence on its service.

Following months of observing platforms change beneath them, numerous content creators express that they're approaching the festive period with a blend of apprehension and acceptance. As Lindsay Ostrom from Pinch of Yum stated, “this inevitably is the most, I think, existential point for us as business owners who create content on the internet” — a modification not solely in the location of published material, but also “how the content is being created.”